Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The article investigates a visual dossier of the transnational history of violence that Coetzee created while working on Dusklands. Special attention will be paid to a number of images depicting Nazi atrocities committed in Central Europe in the late 1930s and early 1940s which have so far failed to attract the attention of Coetzee scholarship due to their incongruence with the rest of the Dusklands research materials. The paper will argue that the images testify to the Central European genealogy of Coetzee’s investigation of various forms of imperialist oppression and that their presence in the writer’s archive is essential to Coetzee’s (and Dusklands’s) project of bridging various colonial/imperial temporalities, geographies, and atrocities, as well as its exploration of the relationship between the photographer and the traumatic events which the latter is about to record. Finally, the article considers the analysed images the manifestations of Dusklands’s “potential” Central European history – the book’s unrealised Central European project.
Source: English in Africa
DOI: 10.4314/eia.v52i1.10
Author: Robert Kusek
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Funder: Narodowym Centrum Nauki
OpenAlex ID: W4415905348
FWCI:
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: