Deconstruction of Postcolonial Diaspora in Disgrace: From Specific Victimization of Humans to Group Portrait of Non-Humans

Abstract

This article reads anew J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace in the deconstructed discourse of diaspora and postcolonialism, as a palimpsest of rearranged reappearances of realities in the form of an artful moral journey. Self-exiled refugees, at the core of diaspora, are firstly and generally examined through the specific re-narration of race and gender that purposefully happens to Lucy Lurie. Then, about her father David Lurie, there comes the analyzed reconstruction of his dissolution, based on the duplication and adaptation of the debauched historic figure, Lord Byron. The father-daughter plot line is simultaneously accompanied by the conflict of land and the victimization of dogs and provides a platform for displaying the crash of humans and non-humans. The article thusly focalizes the collective affliction of the latter and, invoking the concept of ecocriticism and zoocriticism, penetrates the common phenomena of the former’s diaspora in this Anthropocene era.