Negotiating Foundations: Nation, Homeland and Land in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace‪.‬

With the demise of apartheid, South Africa has become a nation in flux and transition, preoccupied with remaking and redefining itself. Undoubtedly, within the postapartheid context, literature has a role to play in redefining the South African polity. For Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly, the emphasis in the remaking of the "new South Africa" should fall on the acknowledgement of difference without fetishizing it (5-13). Like other postapartheid narratives such as Breyten Breytenbach's Dog Heart (1999) and Andre Brink's The Rights of Desire (2001), J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999) is acutely conscious of its situation within the postapartheid context and engaged with redefining the South African nation. In this essay, I argue that what is distinctive about Coetzee's novel is that, within a postapartheid context of uncertain flux and upheaval, it interrogates the identity of the South African nation at its foundations. I will show that the novel posits a foundational discourse that alludes to how the true foundation of South Africa lies in a conception of the nation as the homeland of black South Africans. Conversely, the novel critiques the foundational discourse of white South Africans as a duplicitous rhetoric by means of which whites lay false claim to South Africa as homeland. Foundational discourses that underpin the South African nation are subject to interrogation, contestation, and even to being rewritten in non-foundational terms. In examining the foundations of the South African nation, Disgrace is, further, strongly inclined to conceive of the nation as a homeland. South Africa, in other words, is thought of not merely in the impersonal terms of a nation, but as a homeland toward which one feels a vital sense of belonging and emotional attachment. One is not just citizen of a nation but rather the nation is one's homeland and heartland. To conceive of the nation as a homeland is, to adopt Kenneth Parker's expression, to approach the nation as "the space where the affections center" (67). Specifically, Disgrace's inclination to conceive of South Africa as a homeland is enacted in terms of an emotional relation to the land of South Africa (which one may playfully suggest is the literal foundation of the nation). One aspect of Coetzee's interrogation of the foundations of South Africa will be the attempt to imagine, for the white South African, a conception of the South African nation that is not predicated on land.