The shift of "Self" and "Other" portrayed in the Novels of Three South African Nobel Laureates : J.M. Coetzee, Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer

Abstract

The post-colonial world is often seen as demarcated into binaries like colonizer-colonized, oppressor-oppressed, powerful-powerless and Self-Other. These binaries are often treated as fixed, definable, unchangeable and immune from all outward influence and psychological meddling. As a result, we limit our analysis of subjectivity, selfhood and nationality within these parameters. More than often, we tend to essentialize a post-colonial subject as Self or Other on the sole basis of their racial identity, evading other important issues like class, gender or sexuality. In our attempt to categorize all subjects according to their race, we completely ignore the change of power dynamics resulted from various combinations of ideological, racial, economical or sexual intersections. In this dissertation, I will analyze these issues of established binaries in the light of Homi K. Bhabha‘s post-colonial theories— their impact on society, their alteration through ambivalence, mimicry or hybridity, and finally, the disintegration of these binaries through the shift of power dynamics. As this disintegration of Self-Other is nowhere more visible than the dilemma of white women‘s positionality in post-colonial sites; I will try to unfold this issue through their lives.