(Anti)Barbarous Empires: J.M. Coetzee’s Iconoclasm in <i>Waiting for the Barbarians</i>

Empires usually operate on the premise that only imperial centres are carriers of historical progress humanity, whereas peripheries far removed from this progress’s blessing. According to John Maxwell Coetzee, Dutch Empire considered South Africa as its own land, which deprived country’s indigenous people their citizen rights. Like residents European who were relegated similar zones indistinction, they doomed twilight legal illegality. Unlike regulated area progress, state exception was ruled by whims officials. ‘The security police could come in and out blindfold handcuff you without explaining why, take away an unspecified site do what wanted you’, he wrote Diary a Bad Year (1977: 171). In his novel Waiting for Barbarians , Coetzee strategically ‘unmoors’ ‘deterritorializes’ peripheral exception, spreading iconoclastic effects all over ‘sacrosanct’ territory history.