Whiteness and the Animal Question: Revisiting Coetzee’s Postapartheid South Africa

Abstract

: Scholars such as Evan Mwangi argue that postcolonial animal studies is all too often considered through white environmentalist perspectives and writers exemplified through the centrality of writers such as J.M. Coetzee, Barbara Gowdy, and Lauren Beukes. Mwangi’s criticism makes legible the prevalence of white environmental discourses that have informed prominent readings of Disgrace. The uncritical discourse of animal welfare in the postcolony exposes its explicit ties to apartheid governing and its rhetorical legacy. Through a comparative reading of Coetzee’s Disgrace, the rhetoric of euthanasia by animal welfare organizations, and contemporary reporting on the state of the animal, I attempt to outline a historical centering of white environmentalism, in particular welfarism, in institutional South African discourses of the animal. The novel shows the purportedly humane ideologies of animal welfare in support of euthanasia signal an investment in nation-building in which the animal is ultimately disposable. In opposition to assertions that the animal becomes a vehicle of redemption for the main character, David Lurie, and other redemptive readings of white environmental figures of the novel such as Bev Shaw, I suggest that the novel reveals the legacies of white nationalist imaginaries that continue to undergird state and institutional environmental discourses in South Africa. The purported humane ideologies of animal population control and welfare remain synonymous with white interests. Disgrace signals the tension of institutional expressions of care reconciling the forceful integration of postcolonial nations into global markets with little consideration of the colonial legacies of white worldmaking.