| This thesis explores an alternative to the historical narrative of Empire and seeks to find an alternative form of production that is able to exist outside the confines of Empire. While it would seem that this alternative form of production would emerge from outside the Empire, this thesis purports that a subaltern subjectivity arises from the very colonial conditions it wishes to escape. In J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, the postcolonial subject emerges from the imperial unconscious. Rather than looking at the manifest narrative of the text, this project investigates the unconscious content that is able to escape historical foreclosure. By presenting disfigured and unformed images in the protagonist's dreams, Coetzee's text displays a postcolonial subject that continually re-forms from a postcolonial poetics which is a symptom of the very material conditions that threaten to prevent its emergence. |
