Civilization Perilous: Resituating Coetzee's Barbarians and the West

Abstract: J.M. Coetzee's novel, Waiting for the Barbarians , has long been regarded as a political fable that takes place in an abstract, delocalized world. Source material in the Coetzee archive has revealed, however, that far from featuring a completely invented place, Barbarians is in fact set in the very real and recognizable terrain of Xinjiang, the Westernmost province of China. Relocating the novel into Xinjiang's multi-ethnic context has considerable implications for the way we are to understand Coetzee's positioning of civilized and barbarian peoples. It enables us to see how racialization is used to stabilize the abstract concepts of civilization and barbarism, moving beyond the black-white binary of South African apartheid. Perhaps most importantly, it draws attention to the racialized assumptions that readers themselves bring to the text and highlights the tenuous basis on which civilization constructs itself.