The Decline of Orientalism: Love is the Best Way of Advancing Decolonization

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.