Race and Power in John Maxwell Coetzee’s “Waiting for the Barbarians” and Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”

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Date

2014

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Mouloud Mammeri University of Tizi-Ouzou

Abstract

The title of this dissertation is race and power in John Maxwell Coetzee’s “Waiting for the Barbarians” and Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”. Its aim is to investigate how the two writers, Noble Prize winners, through their master pieces, unearth the deeds of the white as supremacist and powerful in the plantations and through oppressed regime of Apartheid. In this research, we have investigated in “Waiting for the Barbarians” and in “Beloved” how John Maxwell Coetzee and Toni Morrison shed a light on the so prevalent themes that are race and power in their novels. In order to realize the objective of this research, we have selected a theory that of Michel Foucault: Power/Knowledge and Todorov’s theory: The Fear of the Barbarians. We have divided our dissertation into two chapters. The first chapter is entitled power in “Waiting for the Barbarians” and in “Beloved”, where we provided the reader with useful information about the notion of power and how it is used by the white as an upholder of it to oppress and suppress the powerless in order to be subjugated to his will and whims. And, how the powerless questions and resists the imposed and dominated ideology of the white after discovering of the self and enjoying the sense of freedom. The second chapter axes on the notion of race in the two novels, where the powerless is regarded as the other, savage, parasite, trespasser of human race. Finally, in the conclusion we have given an overview about the ideas that are developed in our present dissertation and we have confirmed our hypothesis.

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79p.;30cm.(+cd)

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Citation

Comparative Literature in foreign languages