From Absence to Re(-)Presentation: A Reading of the Female Subaltern’s Body in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians

Abstract

This research paper explores an alternative mode of knowledge-production for the representation of the barbarian girl in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. In light of Chandra Mohanty’s critique pertaining the prominent academic methodologies that subsume all Third World women as homogenous and ahistorical subject of academic investigation, the paper offers an epistemological production of the barbarian girl’s representation without committing the act of ‘epistemic violence’: perceived from the realm of the metatextual instead from that of the textual, the girl’s somatic representation via its ‘presence by absence’ is recalcitrant and unyielding against the violence of imperialism.