J.M. Coetzee in his novel Disgrace (1999), and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her novel Americanah (2013), seek to criticise the out-moded power structures founded upon white privilege in post-Apartheid South Africa and Twenty-First century America respectively. By examining how Fredric Jameson’s ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’ (1986), supported by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s ideas on ‘Empire’ (2000), I will demonstrate how the interrelationships within both of these novels can be successfully read as national allegories of South Africa and America within the texts. However, they’re critical approaches differ. On one end of the social scale, Coetzee exposes David Lurie as an individual possessing paradoxical desires: he is delineated as the embodiment of an old social order, yet he is a white university professor who fetishizes black women. Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’ (1978) highlights how Lurie tries to reclaim the privilege white people had under the Apartheid era in South Africa. At the opposing end of the social scale, Adichie’s protagonist Ifemelu, becomes marginalised as a black woman in America. Joanne Sharp’s discussion on Western ‘benevolence’ highlights how Ifemelu suffers from white privilege, a privilege that for Adichie, defines Twenty-First century America.
Frederic Jameson proposes that:
‘All third-world texts are necessarily […] allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories […] particularly when their forms develop out of predominantly western machineries of representation, such as the novel […] The story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society.’
For Jameson, Third World texts; whilst they may seem concerned with the ‘private’ and the ‘libidinal’, will always project a ‘political dimension in the form of national allegory’. Initial critics and readers of Jameson’s assertion, that ‘national allegory’ is the primary, even exclusive, form of narrativity in the Third World, deemed it to be reductive as it removes artistic complexity from any piece of post-colonial work. For instance, Aijaz Ahmad argues that ‘if societies here are defined by this ‘unitary ‘experience’ of national oppression (if one is merely the object of history, the Hegelian slave) then what else can one narrate but that national oppression? Politically, we are Calibans, all’. Nevertheless, Hardt and Negri in their work ‘Empire’ have shown how ideology influences the entirety of social life, even the most personal and intimate. By reading Jameson, alongside Hardt and Negri’s conception of Empire as infiltrating the most interpersonal of relationships, Jameson’s belief that Third World literature functions as national allegory appears to hold.
Government legislation created under the apartheid regime from 1948 to 1994 encouraged a racial hierarchy and aimed to preserve white privilege in South African society. After the end of apartheid, the Truth and Reconciliation Committee’s attempts to create peace were flawed and ineffective, and instead a power vacuum developed, which led to a state of social uncertainty in South Africa. Disgrace appears in this context of the post-Apartheid moment, and Coetzee portrays this ‘moment’ through the nature of David Lurie’s relationships with other characters in the novel, elevating the interpersonal to this realm of the national. In this ‘new’ South Africa Lurie understands ‘that whites, once all-powerful, are now exposed and vulnerable’. It’s through his sexually abusive relationship with Melanie, one of his university students, and another battling relationship with Petrus, a black farmer, that Coetzee symbolizes white man’s struggle to retain his power and privilege in a chaotic and unruly social order.
Whilst Ifemelu resists and tackles white privilege in Americanah, Lurie seeks to preserve it, and one way he does this is by pursuing sexual relationships with ‘exotic’ women. Edward Said in his work ‘Orientalism’ refers to a cultural practice where white people seek to ‘denigrate, stereotype, exoticize and eroticize’ their oriental ‘other’ in order to control them, and as a result, gain self-validation. Melanie clearly takes on this role of the stereotypical ‘other’ within Lurie’s narrative of self-validation. Lurie describes her exotic features, she has ‘close-cropped black hair, wide, almost Chinese cheekbones [and] large dark eyes’. He even actively translates her name from Melanie to ‘Melani: the dark one’ (D, p.18), literally altering his own perception of her to help her fit this Oriental stereotype.
Through this relationship Coetzee explores how the female body, particularly that of the opposing race, symbolizes a site which men can violently inscribe their authority upon allowing them to claim a form of social power. Lurie’s relationship with Melanie merely manifests itself as an exercise for Lurie to claim power. This is evidenced in the very nature of their sexual encounter. Melanie embodies this ‘denigrated’ oriental ‘other’ as she remains passive throughout, ‘all she does is avert herself: avert her lips, avert her eyes’ (D, p.25). Whilst Lurie says, on reflection, that it wasn’t ‘rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core’ (D, p.26). This sexual violence from Lurie highlights a deeply discursive practice which echoes the way white men in colonial South Africa exploited ‘coloured concubines’ without offering the women long-term security’. Ironically, after Lucy’s rape later in the novel, Lurie remarks how her rapists acted through ‘a history of wrong’ (D, p.156), yet he appears to be blind to the historical importance of his own sexual violence. Instead he takes the view that ‘that is how one must see life in this country: in its schematic aspect’ (D, p.98). It is through this ‘schematic’ perspective that he validates his actions towards Melanie.
Another way that Coetzee allegorizes the tense racial encounters of South African society is through Lurie’s relationship with Petrus. Lurie’s attempt to preserve his white privilege manifests itself in his battle with Petrus. On the farm, when confronted with Petrus, Lurie states that it ‘is a new world they live in, he and Lucy and Petrus, Petrus knows it and he knows it, and Petrus knows that he knows it’ (D, p.116). This offers a psychological insight into how both characters want to seek their own social power. A discursive strategy that Coetzee highlights is the role of language within South African society. Lurie’s isolation and inability to adjust to this new social climate means he resorts to using the language of Afrikaans, representing an almost political strategy by Lurie. For example, he refers to Petrus as a ‘Kaffir’ which was a racial slur used by whites under the Apartheid regime. Lurie’s use of Afrikaner in the novel carries this ‘ideological freight of anti-black nationalism’ and provides himself with a familiar sanctity of white power.
Adichie’s Americanah as a Third World text, brings a ‘different ratio, of the political to the personal’ into the First World by exposing America for its racial hierarchy and white privilege. Adichie achieves this through the portrayal of her black female protagonist Ifemelu and the relationships she has with white characters in the novel. There are two key interrelationships within Americanah that allegorize the social and political conditions of America. Firstly, through Ifemelu’s relationship with Curt, a privileged white male, Adichie allegorizes the internal social conditions of a white capitalist society. Although David Lurie is out-of-sync with his ‘new’ society in Disgrace, Ifemelu becomes attuned to hers in America and exposes white privilege through her subversive blogposts. Ifemelu’s blogging takes on an intertextual space within the novel where race is discussed openly and freely. Crucially, unlike the victims of Lurie’s abuse in Disgrace, the blogposts provide Ifemelu with a voice to resist the white privilege she encounters. In a blog entry she highlights how ‘racism is about the power of a group and in America its white folks who have that power’ (A, 403). After highlighting this political message, Adichie begins to reveal how Ifemelu’s relationship with Curt masks the subtleties of his white privilege. In chapter Thirty-One she sees Curt for ‘the kind of white he was, the untamed golden hair and handsome face, the athletes body, the sunny charm and the smell around him, of money’. (A, p.360) She realises that Curt ‘always lived in a flattering light’. (A, p.181) His physical disposition gives him an advantage within an American society that positively discriminates against white people. It allows him to have an easy subjectivity and an optimistic perspective in the novel, he ‘believed in good omens and positive thoughts and happy endings to films, a trouble free belief’ (A, p. 241). Ifemelu finds this ‘admirable and yet repulsive’ (A, p. 240) that he always ‘live[s] in a flattering light’ and has this ‘trouble free belief’ because it is something which her race and gender in American society cannot afford her. Whilst Curt is cocooned in white male privilege, Ifemelu’s narrative perspective is negatively shaped by her race. For example, her roommate shouts at her “you better not kill my dog with voodoo.” Later in the novel, on her very first day at college, Cristina Tomas, with ‘her washy blue eyes, faded hair and pallid skin’ (A, p.155) tells Ifemelu, “I. Need. You. To. Fill. Out. A. Couple. Of. Forms. Do. You. Understand. How. To. Fill. These. Out?” (A, p.161) Adichie here uses grammatical structure to really expose how Ifemelu is defined and belittled in American society due to the colour of her skin. As Adichie comments, ‘she was at war with the world, and woke up each day feeling bruised, imagining a horde of faceless people who were all against her’ (A, p.152). The difference in the way people view Curt and Ifemelu illuminates how American capitalist society is distinctly racial and patriarchal in character. In Americanah, Adichie suggests how America fundamentally thwarts the aspirations of women of colour and encourages those of white men.
Whereas her relationship with Curt hides more subtle problems of white privilege in America, her brief sexual encounter with the ‘tennis coach’ embodies an extreme manifestation of white privilege. After telling her, in what seems like an uncanny textual echo of Lurie’s sexual fetishism in Disgrace, that he likes her ‘exotic credential, that whole Authentic African thing’ (A, p.151) he gets her to perform sexual acts for money. This relationship illustrates how Ifemelu’s body also becomes a site of domination for white males. Following the sexual exploitation, she is left crippled and depressed: ‘She was bloodless, detached, floating in a world where darkness descended too soon and everyone walked around burdened by coats, and flattened by the absence of light’ (A, p.155). The anonymity of the tennis coach in this scene also hints at the common nature of this scenario in America.
However, Adichie’s most subversive attack on white privilege in America comes when she exposes the nature of Ifemelu’s relationship with Kimberley, her white employer. Americanah appears in a context just after the events of 9/11, a time when America chose to draw ‘Africa back into the colonial geopolitical fold’ encouraging ‘orientalist images of the passive African awaiting the benevolent actions of the western subject’. Kenneth Binyavanga Wainaina mocked the nature of published stories covering the humanitarian crises in Africa; ‘among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked…she must look utterly helpless…she must never say anything except to speak of her (unspeakable) suffering’ . Wainaina argues that to shift the attention of the West towards Africa you need to portray them as ‘benevolent westerners’ by ‘constructing the binary of voiceless victim and the humanitarian saviour’. This false ‘benevolence’ acts like a compassionate colonialism, which by nature, allows America to retain and establish its dominance over Africa. Kimberley’s relationship with Ifemelu in the novel serves as a microcosm of this political approach towards Africa. Kimberley finds out that Ifemelu can’t get a job and therefore views her as someone who needs to be ‘helped’ or ‘saved’ (p.148). She hires Ifemelu as a babysitter and immediately offers her ‘a signing bonus’ and says “Ginika told me you’ve had some challenges…please don’t refuse” (A, p.159). Whilst on a surface reading this appears to be a nice deed, Kimberley’s conscious thought-processing here is tinged by white liberal pretentiousness and hypocrisy. Later in the novel, Kimberley repeatedly apologises after her sister Laura’s ‘aggressive, unaffectionate interest’ in Ifemelu’s African background. Adichie highlights how Kimberley’s repeated apologies are ‘tinged with self-indulgence, as though she believed that she could, with apologies, smooth all the scalloped surfaces of the world’ (A, p.163).
To conclude, both Americanah and Disgrace portray social relationships which act as an allegory to national concerns of politics and race. Through David Lurie’s narrative, Disgrace offers a more violent representation of South African society, highlighting the historically tense situation between blacks and whites in a world fraught by the history of its colonial and apartheid structures. Whereas, Americanah exposes America, as the heartland of the First World, for its structural encouragement of white privilege and in particular, through the plight of Ifemelu, America’s racial and sexual discrimination.