Reading against race: J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, Justin Cartwright's White Lightning and Ivan Vladislavić's The Restless Supermarket

Abstract

Summary In this essay, I argue that the treatment of race that one finds in J.M Coetzee's Disgrace (1999), Justin Cartwright's White Lightning (2002) and Ivan Vladislavić's The Restless Supermarket (2001), is premised on a recognition of the discursive inscription of the category of race in culture. These novels ponder the implications of the cultural basis of this trope by asking, for instance, whether nonracialism is a possibility that is open to the individual in a social context in which discourses of race prevail and, if not, how the individual may counter them. My essay examines not only the ways in which the novels under consideration articulate these questions, but also how they respond to them through a foregrounding of the culturally determined nature of reading.

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