ABSTRACT
Black skin splits under the racist gaze, displaced into signs of bestiality, genitalia, grotesquerie, which reveals the phobic myth of the undifferentiated whole white body. White colonists, while acknowledging the resemblance of black subjects to their own race, do not perceive them as equal. By reducing Africans to ape-like beings or to erotically charged females, some colonial novels emphasize the ‘white presence’—as the white protagonists are presented as heroes with whole bodies and loud voices—while allowing the blacks only a ‘partial’ or ‘virtual presence’. The dissimilarity between the colonial and post-colonial discourses in the representation of the other’s body has its parallel in the portrait of the setting itself. Bearing bodies in decay, subjected to all sorts of humiliation and abuse, J. M. Coetzee’s characters become closer to animals, hence the leitmotif of the dog into which most of them turn.
