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This thesis argues that JM Coetzee’s novels, in particular Foe, Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man and Diary of a Bad Year all illustrate the complexity of, and the ethical implications and far-reaching consequences resulting from an attempt to effect change in contemporary postcolonial societies. Coetzee represents contemporary postcolonial society, by using liminal characters and narrators who are required by personal or societal conflict and/or crises to make ethical choices with significant results. Various narrative conventions and strategies, all of which influence the ethical implications drawn up for the characters/narrators, are used by Coetzee. Reactions of these liminal characters to their crises of choice vary. The implications of relations between liminal characters, protagonists and narrators with regard to the Other are examined and evaluated. The study identifies the strategies used by Coetzee to subtly lure the reader into accepting co-responsibility for ethical choices required of the characters and narrators. The various reactions that a reader could have on the ethical imperative of formulating a personal stance on liminality, both in terms of the texts and in contemporary postcolonial society, are also evaluated. In the final instance the study indicates that a certain development in Coetzee’s own ethical views can possibly be linked to certain narrative patterns in the selected novels. / PhD (English), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

This thesis argues that JM Coetzee’s novels, in particular Foe, Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man and Diary of a Bad Year all illustrate the complexity of, and the ethical implications and far-reaching consequences resulting from an attempt to effect change in contemporary postcolonial societies. Coetzee represents contemporary postcolonial society, by using liminal characters and narrators who are required by personal or societal conflict and/or crises to make ethical choices with significant results. Various narrative conventions and strategies, all of which influence the ethical implications drawn up for the characters/narrators, are used by Coetzee. Reactions of these liminal characters to their crises of choice vary. The implications of relations between liminal characters, protagonists and narrators with regard to the Other are examined and evaluated. The study identifies the strategies used by Coetzee to subtly lure the reader into accepting co-responsibility for ethical choices required of the characters and narrators. The various reactions that a reader could have on the ethical imperative of formulating a personal stance on liminality, both in terms of the texts and in contemporary postcolonial society, are also evaluated. In the final instance the study indicates that a certain development in Coetzee’s own ethical views can possibly be linked to certain narrative patterns in the selected novels. / PhD (English), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

The last three decades have seen the Southern Mexican city of Oaxaca evolve to become an autonomous centre for the creation and promotion of contemporary art on state, national and international levels. The present research's original contribution to knowledge is the analytical investigation of an art movement's response to the political and technological effects characteristic of postmodernity and effected through globalisation. The research uses a hybrid theoretical framework that includes the work of: Fredric Jameson to discuss postmodernism; Nelly Richard to characterise a postmodern Latin America; Homi K. Bhabha to analyse the postcolonial context and the creation of agency; and, inherent to this structure and the context, the work of Néstor García Canclini. The theoretical investigation is supported by ethnography that ascertains how hybrid political thought and community altruism characterise the Oaxacan art community and the aesthetic expression practised by a new generation of its members. Oaxacan contemporary art is based on the success of the post-Rupture primitivist magical realism practised originally by important Oaxacan artists living and travelling in other locations. The most recent generation of contemporary artists in Oaxaca integrates with, upholds and promotes the model of cultural production that is now inextricably intertwined with the local and wider communities. Participant observation and the analysis of the behaviour of the artists studied, focused the investigation on the efficient interaction between artists and collective action as an integrated sector of civil society. The research determines how the artists studied and the wider Oaxacan art community applies their knowledge of global communications and information technology to create and market a cultural product and promote a postmodern social and political perspective. Regarded as a solid sector of the local and regional community due to its national and international standing, the Oaxacan art community constructs political power from significant, direct involvement with micro-projects to engaging in partnerships with state and federal stakeholders in large-scale cultural endeavours. The research discusses projects instigated and undertaken by the artists studied, including the call for a pacifistic solution to the Oaxaca Conflict of 2006, a six-month socio-political uprising caused by actual and historic conditions in the national and regional Left-Right political duel. The strength of the art community is founded on necessary and reinforcing collective action in both artistic and altruistic projects; often combined through the direct use of art in the creation of funds and media-empowered support towards achieving a perceived common good that centres on the protection of identity and the political defence of diversity.

published_or_final_version / Literary and Cultural Studies / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / Humanities / Master / Master of Philosophy

I argue that the ways in which members of the youth generation in Cairo, Egypt consume Arabic-language popular music, and the aesthetic criteria by which they evaluate the worth of various songs and singers, constitute a key component, along with corresponding criteria of political, racial, gendered, and cultural authenticity of Egyptian subjectivity, of a new form of Egyptian gendered national subjectivity in postcolonial modernity. These aesthetic and authenticating criteria are fundamentally interrelated, as one’s consumer preferences within genres of Egyptian popular music are often taken as indicative of the nature of one’s Egyptian subjectivity. For previous generations in postcolonial Egypt, discriminating taste for high modernist aesthetics in popular music, especially the singer Umm Kulthūm, comprised an aspect of desirable cultural modernity and authenticity. This aesthetic has been superseded among contemporary youth by an emphasis on direct emotional evocation as an index of authenticity. Correspondingly, youth in Cairo have come to judge the authenticity of their Egyptian subjectivity against the political subjectivity of their elders’ generations, and the authenticity of their gendered, racial, and cultural subjectivities against those of the West and those of other Arab countries, most particularly Lebanon. / text