J. M. 쿳시의 『야만인을 기다리며』에 나타난 제국 내 공간 재현의 정치성

This paper aims to investigate the representations of space in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians and explore how the novel politicizes and criticizes these spatial images as a form of imperial epistemology. As Benedict Anderson famously notes, in human history, the practice of mapping has devoted itself to the creation of racial/sexual knowledge, legitimizing one’s dominance over the other. Like museums and censuses, maps have worked as the key instrument for classifying a group of people into a territory while displaying its results as codified knowledge. In the novel, this issue of space and mapping within the colonial context has been brought out through an interesting allegorical representation of the colonized spaces. The focus of the study is not only the geographical spaces of the indigenous inhabitants described in the text, but also the bodily space of a barbarian girl and the surface of wooden slips, whose blankness and mysteriousness the imperial subjects think can be finally deciphered. Grounded in the postcolonial notion of space that is always unconsciously perceived as a crucial nexus of sex, race, and ethnicity, this paper also tentatively notes how Coetzee’s general concern about the elite representation of the oppressed is discussed through his complex portrayal of the magistrate, one of the most ambivalent character in his novels. It finally concludes that the magistrate’s attempt at self-criticism through the representation of the other is an inevitable failure due to his inability to recognize an underlying desire to represent himself as a coherent political subject.