ABSTRACT
The body can be considered as an identitarian map whose nature endows its owner with an individual subjectivity while helping the narrators seeking the story of the bloody body to re-read their own identity in a different light. The body, framed as a bloody entity, can first be read as a map that helps us read J. M. Coetzee’s novels while placing them within geographical and historical contexts. White areas were restricted only to white citizens, while the Black and Colored communities were pushed further into what came to be called the homelands or the Bantustans. In Coetzee’s Foe, the body of the slave is framed in a way that undeniably places Friday within the context of imperialism with much imperial violence inflicted upon his body. The body bears the traces of colonial violence and transcends its corpo-reality to become an allegory of historical realities translated in Coetzee’s texts as metaphors of blindness and contamination.
