Write a 15,000 word thesis on the novel ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ by J.M Coetzee, specifically focusing on
Coetzee’s interrogation of binary oppositions in the text through a Postcolonial lens. Key to the inquiry will be
an investigation of how Coetzee constructs ideas around: self and other, civilisation and barbarism, male
versus female, knowledge versus ignorance, innocence versus evil, allegory versus history. Postcolonial
theorists, such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha are used in order to shed light on the
Empire’s construction of the Other in the figure of the Barbarian, the subaltern status of the barbarian girl and
the liminal figure of the Magistrate