J M Coetzee and African Studies

Abstract

Turning to the archive to consider J M Coetzee's early teaching career and his notes on his first novel, Dusklands, this article argues that the writer's early engagement with the works of Césaire, Senghor, and Fanon and his preparations to teach African Studies had a shaping effect on his fiction.

Keywords:

• Dusklands
• Foe
• Research in African Literatures
• African Studies
• negritude

Notes

1 This is an updated version of the account I give in Tim Mehigan and Christian Moser, eds., The Intellectual Landscape in the Works of J. M. Coetzee 277–81.

 

2 The late John Daniel, a distinguished South African social scientist and activist, contradicts this view, saying that he was first introduced to Marxist historiography by Coetzee at SUNY, Buffalo. Correspondence with Glenn Moss, 2 September 2014.

 

3 Here and throughout I rely on Coetzee’s lecture notes on his teaching at SUNY, Buffalo, which are held by the Amazwi South African Museum of Literature in Makhanda, South Africa.

 

4 Peter McDonald provides a detailed account of the course Coetzee offered at UCT, in ‘The Book in South Africa’ (see Attwell and Attridge 800–03).

 

5 J M Coetzee Papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Notebook, Foe, 2 November 1983.

 

6 J M Coetzee Papers, Notebook, Foe, 1 December 1983. I give a longer account of this in J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) 148–60.

 

7 Imraan Coovadia writes (with reference to my account of Foe in J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing), ‘It is striking that Attwell describes a celebrated white writer – hesitating to express his misgivings about third world suffering – as the equivalent of a tongueless slave,’ adding ‘Coetzee makes no such claim in his own voice’ (206). I do not say anything so reductive. After much discussion, with evidence from the manuscripts, including this passage, I conclude that Friday’s silence is, among other things, an expression of Coetzee’s judgement about the failures of cultural nationalism. This failure leaves him with ‘neither the inclination nor the authority to supply the vision that is missing’ (158). In early drafts, Friday speaks, sometimes in mimicry.