Colonial Settlement and Environmental Apocalypse in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians

This article examines postcolonial literature, particularly that of J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), through the lens of the environmental perspective to demonstrate Coetzee’s ecological consciousness in his early work. Although Coetzee’s works are usually classified as an exemplary canon for the studies of postcolonialism, his novels have been recently reexamined by scholars of animal studies and ecocriticism. Despite the growing awareness of Coetzee’s significant stance on the environmental discourse, Coetzee’s earlier work, Waiting for the Barbarians, receives relatively little attention among ecocritical critics. Waiting for the Barbarians demonstrates how the imperial abuse not only harms indigenous people but also threatens the sustainability of the colonized land through land dispossession, displacement, and territorial destruction in the name of civilization. This study aims to scrutinize how Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians grapples with the two intersectional issues of the environment and social justice through the protagonist, the Magistrate’s resistance against the settler colonial political system—Empire—and its abuse of the occupied humans, animals, and lands. Thus, the first part of this study articulates the current discourse on postcolonial ecocriticism and why this emergence matters concerning the connection that anthropocentric violence orders the lives of others. The second part of this essay investigates how the concern for human beings goes hand in hand with the concern for the environment. Ultimately, the purpose of this study extends the study of postcolonial ecocriticism that calls for attention to the interrelationship or dependency among humans and non-humans for the persistence of a livable world.