| John Maxwell Coetzee is the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 and one of the most important contemporary white South African novelists.Dusklands and Disgrace are two of his representative works written in different periods.Based on Stuart Hall’s cultural identity theory,this thesis analyzes Coetzee’s novels Dusklands and Disgrace to find out the changing status of the South African white diaspora in the apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa,and how they finally find a sense of belonging in the land.The thesis is composed of three chapters in addition to the introduction and conclusion.The first chapter,focused primarily on the novel Dusklands,describes the superior status of whites in South Africa during the first half of the 18th century and the persecution of native South Africans.The second chapter is mainly based on the novel Disgrace,which describes the dilemma of white South Africans in the post-apartheid era,including the survival predicament of white South Africans who had to work with blacks,the strait of white South Africans after being destroyed by blacks spiritually,and the difficult position of white language marginalization in terms of culture.And all these difficulties show that whites gradually move from the center of society to the other and become the marginalized people of the new South Africa.Chapter three reveals the choices white South Africans make in the face of their troubles.They recognize the diversity of their cultural identities,begin to accept their double identities,and realize that only by decentering can they live in peace with blacks.In these two novels,Coetzee denounces the harm and cultural trauma that white colonialism and apartheid inflicted on black South Africans,as well as the atrocities committed by black South Africans against whites.This thesis holds that a possible way to solve the racial problem in South Africa is to abandon violent confrontation and transcend historical hatred.Only by eliminating or alleviating the binary thinking mode of black and white can racial reconciliation be achieved probably. |
