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Jacques Derrida's politics of hospitality explores the tension and interdependency that exist between hosts and guests. This article uses Derrida's idea of hospitality and attempts to understand how it applies to the 21st century refugee crisis in the context of human displacement, state of refugee and immigration. We turn to the help of fiction as a critical tool in scrutinizing current political discourses. Specifically, we offer an analysis of J.M Coetzee's novel Disgrace in light of Derrida's theme of hospitality. Coetzee – who was awarded the Nobel Prize – presents a vivid portrait of post-apartheid South Africa that offers a contradictory perspective to Nelson Mandela's vision of democracy in South Africa. His novel suggests that the inherent violence of colonialism can neither be resolved nor dissolved merely by expressions of regret and forgiveness. By extension, we ask if liberal democracies and international humanitarian law can offer a policy of hospitality that is both morally anchored and practical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The present paper is an attempt to investigate and throw some light on J. M. Coetzee's celebrated novel Disgrace (1999) in South Africa's postapartheid in order to indicate the ramifications in the aftermath of apartheid in which with the subversion of the white authority, and the change in power structures of the society, the once dominant ideology presupposing the white superiority over the black fades away. Through identity crisis, mimicry and violence, the white hegemony shatters and a new power structure comes into being. Hence, David Lurie, the protagonist along with his daughter Lucy are taken as representatives of the whites that suffer both physically and psychologically and go through an identity crisis which leads them to a kind of awareness regarding their current situation in the postapartheid period. Having endured and suffered some pains that are going to be presented in the subsequent sections of the current study, David and Lucy draw a conclusion that there is apparently no way but co-existence and compromise between the two races. Apartheid, indeed, leaves a wound for both the black and the white through conflicts and collisions between them. Therefore, Lucy can be regarded as the symbol of redemption and reconciliation between the two races. In what follows, the word apartheid will be first defined and elaborated on, then applied to Coetzee's selected novel in order to examine and demonstrate its overarching effects on both the white and the black. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines different situations and events in J.M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace (1999) that turn the white male protagonist and his daughter into victims of post-apartheid South African violence at the hands of black men. From initial exploiters, the whites become the exploited and have to accept that they are part of a larger social and political struggle to (re)construct a country that is still deeply confronted with racial discrimination and a high crime rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can educators and their students interrogate the ethics and politics of suffering in ways that do not create fixed and totalized narratives from the past? In responding to this question, this essay draws on J. M. Coeetze’s Disgrace, and discusses how this novel constitutes a crucial site for bearing witness to the suffering engendered by apartheid through inventing new forms of mourning and community. The anti-historicist stance of the novel is grounded on the notion that bearing witness to suffering without betraying it means refusing to represent it, that is, refusing to translate history and speak of it; instead, the novel’s characters remain inconsolable before history. The essay builds on these ideas and considers whether educators and their students need to (re)learn the limits of historicism in comprehending conflict, oppression, otherness and suffering; also, it examines the educational implications of such a pedagogical task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One year after the massive, five-volume Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report appeared in 1998, we indisputably witness in Coetzee's Disgrace , by way of the account of professor David Lurie's downfall, the upheaval of a country in transition. The representation of this upheaval, however, drew considerable attention nationally and internationally and sparked a still ongoing debate on what Coetzee was trying to say about the life and times of post-apartheid South Africa. In this essay it is argued that an interpretation that allows itself to be guided too much by an allegorical meaning of Disgrace 's mirror plot and that is too quick to accept the referentiality of a post-apartheid South Africa screaming for future images, ignores important if not essential plot lines and intertextual echoes. The powers of imagination, as masterfully deployed by J. M. Coetzee, make the role of literature in the production of cultural memory both monumentalising and ambiguous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]