Identification And Compromise

John Maxwell Coetzee is the winner of Nobel-Prize for literature in 2003. His Disgrace has prompted various criticisms since it got published. It depicts a series of disgraceful events on the white and revenges of the black in the post-apartheid times. The white colonizers are experiencing the unprecedented survival crises. Survival on this African land means identifying and making compromise with themselves as well as the black. Since few critics centre their studies of Disgrace on the universal theme, this thesis will focus on not only the survival of the white in South Africa, but also the survival and development of humanity in general.The author of the present thesis takes a postcolonial perspective to interpret Coetzee's Disgrace. Homi Bhabha's mimicry and hybridity, Edward Said's exile and Hegel's master/slave dialectic provide rich and sound theoretic foundation for this dissertation. Just through mimicry and hybridity, the former colonized survive the apartheid South Africa. The white, in both colonial times and postcolonial times, also have to deploy the strategy of hybridity for their coexistence with the black and their survival. Mimicry is still the black's means of survival in the new times. All these strategies are not fixed and stable. They foretell the danger of subversion of the colonizer and the colonized when new time is at hand. Exile, for the white, is the sure way they follow when their privilege and dominance are all gone. The change of political situation in the apartheid-free South Africa will inevitably change the relationship between the white and the black. The master/slave relationship is deconstructed. To survive, the white have to come to terms with the world and the black have to live with the aftermath of the colonial history in the new times. Disgrace reveals to us that mimicry, hybridity, exile and the reversal of master/slave relationship is the inevitable outcome of colonialism. In order to survive in the apartheid-free South Africa, the ex-colonizers need to throw off their superior ideology and adapt to the new situations. For the whole world, only through hybridity, compromise and negotiations can different races and cultures coexist peacefully and benefit mutually.