ABSTRACT
In this chapter, J.M. Coetzee emerges as the most important chronicler of a provincial aesthetics that is closely tied to the local histories of South Africa, and hence a counterpoint to the aesthetic regime of world literature as described by Jacques Rancière. Coetzee’s provincial aesthetics is a product of South African history with its long history of race management through colonial and apartheid rule, and it is most clearly stated against what he perceives as a tradition of “white writing.” In a series of anti-pastoral novels like In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), and Life & Times of Michael K (1983), he fleshes out this anti-pastoralist position, but it is with Disgrace (1999) that one witnesses the full potential of his provincial aesthetics. This chapter offers a detailed reading of the novel, along with Coetzee’s other fictional and non-fictional writing, to show how his writing marks a zone of exception in the ever-expansive world of Anglophone world literature.
