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Dusklands and the postcolonial turn
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Journal Article
Dusklands and the postcolonial turn
2025
Overview
Anticipating Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) by four years, J.M. Coetzee’s Dusklands (1974) activated many of the intellectual currents that later developed into the transnational intellectual movement of postcolonial critique. Both works were aimed at deconstructing the intimate connections between colonial and discursive power, but while Orientalism declared a principal indebtedness to Michel Foucault, Coetzee’s critique was eclectic, including elements of post-Hegelianism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and the existentialist insurgent work of anticolonial theorists such as Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi. The fact that Coetzee distilled these currents into autobiographically-inflected fiction rather than theoretical critique, and its initial publication by Ravan Press in Johannesburg, might have limited the work’s international reach until it was republished by Secker and Warburg in 1982, but it was clearly ahead of its time. This paper argues that it is precisely the fictional enactment of this text that gives it power and lasting relevance in its acknowledgement of positionality, identity, and their relation to form.
