Abstract
In the last quarter of the twentieth century South African author J. M. Coetzee wrote Waiting for the Barbarians. This novel, argu- ably the best-known book by the winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, is an illuminating introduction to one of the most popular versions of the Western narrative of barbarism. The story takes place in a frontier city under the jurisdiction of a political entity known as “The Empire.” The civilized inhabitants seem to have a comfortable life. Indeed, their only source of discomfort is a loose collective of nomads who live outside the immediate borders of civilization and who are designated as “the barbarians.” Despite their relative inoffensive portrayal, a militaristic faction within the Empire begins fomenting hostility, proceeding to inform the population that the barbarians are preparing to invade and destroy civilization. Depicting the barbarians as anarchically seditious, sexually perverse, and brutishly uncivilized, the Empire engages in a preemptive strike, invading barbaric territory, and kidnapping, imprisoning, torturing, and even killing barbarians in a public spectacle.
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Notes
J. M. Coetzee, WaitingfortheBarbarians (New York: Vintage, 1976).
Walter Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” in Walter Benjamin Erzählen (Frankfurt Au Main: Shurkamp, 2007), 132. Hannah Arendt, ed., “Thesis on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 256.
See Enrique Dussel, “Europe, Modernity and Eurocentrism,” Nepantla 1.3 (2000): 465–468.
Homer, Iliad, Robert Fagles, trans. (New York: Penguin Classics, 1998), 2, 867.
Herodotus, The Histories, George Rawlinson, trans. (Lawrence: Digireads, 1987), 4, 168. See a critical reflection in James Redfield, “Herodotus the Tourist,” in Greeks and Barbarians. Thomas Harrisson, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 24–49.
Aeschylus, Persae, A. E. F. Garvie, trans. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 27–3, 422, 608, 544.
Aristotle, The Politics and the Constitution, Stephen Everson, trans. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1252b. See critical engagement in Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Selfdefinition Through Tragedy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 164–165.
Marcus Tullius Cicero, The Republics and the Law, Nial Rudd, trans. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1, 57–59.
Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, B. O. Foster, trans. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), IX. 86 and XXI. 29, 15–16. For critical analysis see W. R. Jones, “The Image of the Barbarian in Medieval Europe,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 13.4 (1971): 379.
Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourseleves, Leon Roudiez, trans. (New York and Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1991), 88–90.
An alternative reading of this assertion that associates Christian supressionism with Jewish irremidibility can be seen in Jonathan Boyarin, The Uncoverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 137–138.
Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 87–126.
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Mark Musa, trans. (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 97–108 and 325–327. See critical comments in Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 68–72. The origin of the word Saracen is object of scholarly disagreements. Some versions argue it is a Greco-Roman term, but others radically dismiss it. If this were true, it would argue for an earlier retrieval of Greco-Roman conceptions of otherness.
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Immanuel Wallerstein, European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power (New York: The New Press, 2006), 5–14.
Juan Ginés de Sepulveda, Democrates Segundo; o De Las justas causas de la guerra contra los indios (Madrid: CSIC, 1951), 35.
For a decolonial critique of the typology presented by Bartolomé de las Casas see Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance (Ann Harbor: Michigan University Press, 1995), 441–443.
As cited in Sue Peabody “‘A Nation Born to Slavery’: Missionaries and Racial Discourse in Seventeen-Century French Antilles,” Social History 38.1 (2004): 117.
Peter Mack, “Perceptions of Black Africans in the Renaissance,” in Africa and the Renaissance, Ezio Bassani and William Fagg, eds. (New York: Center for African Art, 1989), 21–26.
As cited in Andrew Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of the Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 32–41.
Emmanuel Eze has done a superb groundwork collecting these voices. See Denis Diderot, “Negre,” and David Hume, “On National Characters,” in Race and Enlightenment: A Reader, Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed. (Malden: Blackwell, 1997), 29 and 30–34.
Susan Back-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti,” Critical Inquiry 26.4 (2000): 863–864.
Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 175.
Georg W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (Berlin: Dunker and Humbolt, 1840), 116. Hugh Barr Nisbet, trans., Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 176.
As quoted in Richard Swedberg, Toqueville’s Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 49–53.
Alexis de Toqueville, Travail sur l’Algérie (Octobre 1841) (Quebec: University of Quebec, 2001), 4. Jenniffer Pitts, ed. and trans., “Essay on Algeria (October, 1841),” in Writings on Empire and Slavery (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 59.
Mark Salter, Barbarians and Civilization in International Relations (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 25–27.
Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 21–35.
Irene Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 107, 143–153.
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Victor Mardsen, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (San Diego: The Book Trees, 1999), 96.
I bid., 276. For the influence of the protocols, see the classic Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Wise of Zion (New York: Harper and Row, 1967); and a more contemporary interpretation Esther Webman, The Global Impact of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Century Old Myth (London and New York: Routledge, 2011).
Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins, 1986), 8 and 311.
Jonathan Schovsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Rabson Wuriga, “Role and Impact of Intellectual Factor in the 18th-20th century ‘European conception of’ Jews as Jews’: A Revisition,” Human Architecture 7.2. (2009): 53–68.
Adam Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 7–12, 231–246.
Narratives of the Muselmann can be found in multiple Holocaust survivors including Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. A wonderful re-interpretation of this role in the relation/split of Jews and Muslims can be found in Gill Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enem (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 141 and 162.
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© 2014 Santiago Slabodsky
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Slabodsky, S. (2014). The Narrative of Barbarism: Western Designs for a Globalized North. In: Decolonial Judaism. New Approaches to Religion and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137345837_3
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