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This thesis aims to explore the production of colonial discourse in terms of what J. M. Coetzee calls "white writing." By examining the production of white writing, the main task of this project seeks to delve into the compressed and yet disjunctive temporality and spatiality of the representaional framework of colonial discourses. To facilitate my investigation in such radical terms, Henri Lefebvre's theorization of spatial politics will thus serve as my piint of entry into the laden chronotope of this white writing. Michel Foucault's archaeological analysis of discursive formations and practices provides another forcful critical leverage upon which my theoretical framework will base. Chapter One is devoted precisely to a detailed definition and analysis of such critical terminology.
Chapter Two is an attempt to unpack the Crusoe case. As my analysis of the "Robinsonnade" tries to open up the process of colonial self-inscription on the alien space, for instance, so the following sections in this chapter aim to explore the colonial rise of the English novel and the construction of a sovereign European colonizing subiect. My project thus entails a twofold and contrapuntal endeavor: first, to trace and expose the construction of the self-consolidating colonialist subject in the production of white writing; second, to rechart the colonial historiography by exposing its underlying configuration of otherness in which the Self produces and codifies knowledge of the Other. The double engagements proposed here will serve to further problematize the Self/Other dichotomy, making possible an overhaul of the modality of transcultural inscription within such a historiography.
Chapter Three, "The Trial of Alterity," further examines the making of this colonizing subject with a reanding of Coetzee's portayal of a prototypical colonialist figure Jacobus Coetzee. With his brutal copulas of the devouring eyes and the gun, Jacobus inscribes himself on the alien space by staging an explorative journey of self-construction as a way to translate himself across the "told tale" of colonial scenarios. Chapter Four isdevoted to Coetzee's Foe, in which I wish to demonstrate that the configuration of the Other, now culminating in the figure of Friday the mute (d) slave, will finally gain its transformative power asa force to pre-empt, and thus to exhaust, the very source and site of such white witing.
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