Disgrace, displacement and reparation in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.

Abstract

In this paper I argue that the past apartheid South Africa that is represented in Disgrace is a metaphorical borderland where there is no clear cut distinction between self and other. I explore the concept of boundary blurring as a route to re-reading the issue of reparation in the novel, focusing mainly on the boundary of the Eastern Cape as a landscape with a fraught history and a space in which identities are formed and transformed across the boundenes of age, gender and rice.