White Supremacist Discourse and its Contradictions in George Bernard Shaw’s The Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search for God (1932) and John Maxwell Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)

Abstract

This dissertation reads whites’ postcolonial literature in terms of dissidence. It studies Bernard Shaw’s The Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search for God (1932) and J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). Emphasis is put on the way these works demonstrate the power of the white supremacist discourse and its contradictions in an attempt to oppose it. This research relies on John Brannigan’s New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (1998) in which he studies the concept of dissidence in literary works that resist the dominant cultures. This study discusses the way the white supremacist discourse perpetuates power through racism, hegemony and domination, and analysis the contradictions of the white supremacist discourse which result in opposition and dissidence. The conclusion which has been reached is that the two authors dissent from the white civilization as they stand against their own race. I end my dissertation with a suggestion that many literary works in addition to those of Bernard Shaw and J.M. Coetzee can be read in terms of dissidence, their examination within their historical context would show the existence of an evolution in the postcolonial discourse from the decolonization period to, for instance, the Apartheid era in South Africa.