Author(s)

Qinglan Chen ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ Department of English, Language & Theatre Studies, National University of Singarpore, 119077, Singapore

Corresponding Author

Qinglan Chen

ABSTRACT

As an excellent post-colonial novel published by Coetzee in 1999, Disgrace describes the South Africa after colonialism has receded and apartheid has been abolished. This novel shows the decline of the white subject, which is represented by the hero Lurie, from the center to the periphery, symbolizing the failure of colonial domination and the "Orientalist" ideology. However, the brutal event that happened to Lurie's daughter Lucy, who was raped multiply by some blacks, is a repetition of colonial violence, and this is precisely what this novel makes us think about: decolonization should not be the repetition of the colonizers' logic, simply reversing the statuses and replacing the Western hegemony with another hegemony on the basis of the same logic. In the end of the novel, Lucy was willing to raise her child, whose birth was the result of a rape, with love to prove the possibility of reconciliation. This shows that in the post-colonial period, love is the best way of facilitating harmonious coexistence and advancing decolonization.

KEYWORDS

Disgrace, Love, Apartheid, Orientalism, Post-colonialism

CITE THIS PAPER

Qinglan Chen, The Decline of Orientalism: Love is the Best Way of Advancing Decolonization. Journal of Sociology and Ethnology (2023) Vol. 5: 71-75. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/jsoce.2023.050913.

REFERENCES

[1] Coetzee J. M. Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech in David Attwell, ed., Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. 
[2] Coetzee J. M. Disgrace. London: Vintage, 1999.
[3] Edward W. Said. Orientalism. London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978.
[4] Nancy A. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. London: Oxford University Press 1983.
[5] Spivak G. C. Can the subaltern speak. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: Illinois UP, 1988.
[6] Sanders M. Truth, Telling, Questioning: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull, and Literature after Apartheid [J]. MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 2000, 46(1): 13-41.

Sponsors, Associates, and Links

---

• Journal of Language Testing & Assessment
  
  
• Information and Knowledge Management
  
  
• Military and Armament Science
  
  
• Media and Communication Research
  
  
• Journal of Human Movement Science
  
  
• Art and Performance Letters
  
  
• Lecture Notes on History
  
  
• Lecture Notes on Language and Literature
  
  
• Philosophy Journal
  
  
• Science of Law Journal
  
  
• Journal of Political Science Research
  
  
• Advances in Broadcasting