Assignment Paper 203: Post Colonial Study

  Paper 203: Post Colonial Study 

Academic Information :

Name : Hirani Kumkum V 

Roll No : 14

Sem : 3

Batch: 2024 - 26

Email : kumkumhirani6@gmail.com

 Assignment 

Table of content :

• Introduction
• Colonial Discourse in Robinson Crusoe
• Foe as a Postcolonial Rewriting
• Power, Language, and Silence
• Gender and Narrative Authority
• Friday and the Subaltern Voice
• Postcolonial Theoretical Perspectives
• Deconstruction of Authorship
• Comparative Analysis
• Conclusion
• Reference 

Rewriting the Empire: Foe by J. M. Coetzee as a Postcolonial Response to Robinson Crusoe

Introduction :

   J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) is a complex postmodern and postcolonial reimagining of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), one of the most canonical works of English literature and imperial ideology. Defoe’s Crusoe has long been viewed as an embodiment of the Enlightenment man rational, industrious, and representative of European colonial expansion. Coetzee, writing from apartheid-era South Africa, revisits this classic tale to question its assumptions about civilization, race, gender, and authorship.

      Through the inclusion of a new female narrator, Susan Barton, and a reimagined Friday who cannot speak, Coetzee transforms Crusoe’s imperial adventure into a powerful allegory of silenced voices and the politics of storytelling. Foe can be read as a literary intervention that “rewrites the Empire” by challenging the epistemological and ideological structures embedded in colonial narratives.

    This assignment explores how Coetzee’s Foe operates as a postcolonial response to Robinson Crusoe subverting the myth of the self-made man, dismantling colonial hierarchies, and exposing the politics of language and representation. It also situates Foe within postcolonial theory, drawing upon the insights of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, to argue that Coetzee’s rewriting reclaims the narrative space denied to the colonized and the marginalized.

Colonial Ideology in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe

      Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719, during the height of European colonial expansion. The novel became an emblem of capitalist individualism and imperial conquest. Crusoe’s isolation on the island becomes a metaphor for the European mastery over nature and non-European peoples. The act of naming the island, cultivating land, and “civilizing” Friday embodies the colonizer’s attempt to control and define the world.

      Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism (1993), argues that the imperial project is deeply inscribed in European literary texts. Robinson Crusoe is not merely an adventure story; it is a foundational text of empire-building. Crusoe’s relationship with Friday exemplifies the power dynamics of the colonizer and the colonized the European as master and the native as the obedient servant.

         Defoe’s narrative also reflects the Enlightenment ideals of reason, progress, and individual autonomy. Crusoe constructs his own “miniature empire” on the island, representing the triumph of European rationality. However, this narrative simultaneously erases the Other Friday’s history, language, and identity are subsumed under Crusoe’s authority.

Coetzee’s Foe: The Postcolonial Revision

       Coetzee’s Foe re-enters the same imaginative landscape but fundamentally alters its moral and political center. Set within the same cast of characters Crusoe (here named “Cruso”), Friday, and a new addition, Susan Barton the novel rewrites Defoe’s narrative from the margins.

        In Foe, Cruso is not a heroic figure but an aged, weary man who builds terraces for no apparent purpose. His island is barren, his labor futile, and his authority meaningless. By stripping away Defoe’s sense of purpose and providence, Coetzee empties the myth of colonial mastery.

     Susan Barton, a castaway who joins Cruso and Friday, becomes the narrator of their story. After returning to England, she seeks to have her experiences written and published by Daniel Foe (the historical author Daniel Defoe). However, she struggles to convey the truth of her experiences, especially Friday’s silence, to a writer more interested in shaping her story into a marketable adventure.

      Thus, Coetzee uses Foe to dramatize the process of storytelling itself who gets to tell the story, whose voice is heard, and whose silence is transformed into fiction. As Gayatri Spivak famously asks in her essay Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988), the colonized subject is often spoken for rather than allowed to speak. Friday’s tonguelessness in Foe literalizes this condition of enforced silence.

The Politics of Silence: Friday as the Subaltern :

      Friday’s silence is the most haunting and central feature of Foe. His tongue has been cut out, presumably by slave traders, and thus he cannot tell his own story. Susan Barton’s repeated attempts to “make him speak” are met with failure. His silence becomes an ethical and political challenge to both Barton and the reader.

       Spivak’s theory of the subaltern helps us understand this dimension of Foe. The subaltern, according to Spivak, is the subject who cannot speak within the dominant discourse because their speech is not recognized as meaningful or authoritative. Friday’s mutilated body becomes the symbol of colonial violence the erasure of native languages, histories, and subjectivities.

      In one of the novel’s most powerful moments, Susan imagines the sea as containing the “unwritten” story of Friday’s past, suggesting that history itself has drowned the voices of the oppressed. Coetzee thus transforms Friday from a character into a metaphor for the lost histories of colonized peoples.

Susan Barton and the Gendered Perspective

    Coetzee introduces Susan Barton not merely as a narrative device but as a critique of patriarchy within colonial discourse. While Defoe’s world is masculine, centered on control and conquest, Coetzee’s Foe is narrated by a woman who must struggle to assert her authority in a male-dominated literary and social world.

      Susan’s attempt to get her story written by Daniel Foe mirrors the historical marginalization of women writers. Foe’s insistence on reshaping her narrative into a tale of adventure reflects how female experiences are often rewritten to suit patriarchal expectations.

      Homi Bhabha’s concept of “hybridity” and “the third space” can also be applied to Susan Barton. She occupies a liminal position neither fully colonizer nor colonized, neither fully authoritative nor silenced. Through her, Coetzee explores how gender intersects with race and colonial power, making Foe both a postcolonial and feminist text.

Narrative Authority and the Problem of Representation :

      A central concern in Foe is the problem of representation how stories are told and who controls them. Susan Barton’s narrative is framed, revised, and rewritten by Daniel Foe, whose authority as a “man of letters” overrides her own.

      This metafictional structure exposes the artificiality of storytelling. By showing the process of a story being written, Coetzee questions the very possibility of representing truth. The colonizer’s narrative, as in Robinson Crusoe, pretends to be universal, but it is built upon silenced voices and distorted histories.

       Edward Said’s argument that “narrative is the beginning of empire” becomes crucial here. In Foe, the empire’s power to define the world is challenged by a counter-narrative that refuses closure and certainty. The absence of Friday’s voice destabilizes the entire text without him, the story remains incomplete.

       Coetzee thus performs what Aijaz Ahmad calls a “postcolonial rewriting” of Western literary forms, using the tools of the colonizer’s language to reveal its contradictions.

The Sea as a Metaphor for History and Memory :

 

      Throughout Foe, the sea functions as a recurring metaphor for loss, history, and the unknown. For Susan, the sea contains Friday’s past, his homeland, and his forgotten story. It represents what cannot be recovered the erased narratives of slavery and displacement.

   Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, in Decolonising the Mind (1986), emphasizes the importance of reclaiming language and history from colonial domination. Coetzee’s sea imagery reflects the impossibility of full recovery. The colonial past cannot be wholly rewritten, only acknowledged as a space of silence and trauma.

Coetzee’s Ethical Vision and Postcolonial Critique

      Coetzee’s rewriting is not a mere parody or inversion of Defoe; it is an ethical engagement with history and language. By refusing to give Friday a voice, Coetzee resists the temptation to “speak for” the subaltern. Instead, he exposes the reader’s complicity in the desire for closure and comprehension.

     In this sense, Foe differs from more celebratory forms of postcolonial rewriting. It acknowledges the limits of representation and the moral responsibility of the writer. As Derek Attridge notes, Coetzee’s fiction “enacts an ethics of reading” by confronting readers with what cannot be fully known or articulated.

The Ending: Silence and the Unfinished Story

        The novel’s final section, where the narrator (possibly Coetzee himself) explores the wrecked ship at the bottom of the sea, serves as an allegory for the submerged histories of colonialism. Friday lies beneath the water, and from his mouth, “a stream of bubbles” emerges an image of language without words, communication without comprehension.

    This haunting image encapsulates the novel’s central theme: history’s drowned voices may never be recovered, but their silence still speaks. Coetzee’s ending refuses closure, leaving readers in an ethical and interpretive dilemma. The rewriting of Robinson Crusoe thus becomes not an act of redemption but of acknowledgmenta recognition of what empire has destroyed.

Conclusion :

      Foe stands as one of the most powerful postcolonial interventions in modern literature. By rewriting Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Coetzee dismantles the imperial myths of civilization, mastery, and authorship. Through Friday’s silence and Susan Barton’s struggle for narrative agency, Foe exposes how colonial discourse depends on silencing and exclusion.

      The novel ultimately argues that true decolonization is not achieved by replacing one voice with another but by recognizing the multiplicity of silences that history has produced. In doing so, Coetzee redefines the relationship between language, power, and ethics transforming a classic tale of conquest into a meditation on the limits of storytelling itself.

Reference :

Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. Verso, 1992.

Attridge, Derek. J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event. University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.

Coetzee, J. M. Foe. Penguin Books, 1986.

Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Oxford University Press, 2008.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. James Currey, 1986.

Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage Books, 1993.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 271–313.