Starving Across the Color Line

Chapter 4 examines the writing of J. M. Coetzee in the context of late apartheid South Africa, where the call to political responsibility returns with a new urgency. Coetzee breaks with this consensus, maintaining a commitment to aesthetic autonomy through his investment in a European modernist tradition that incorporates the art of hunger. In a context where hunger itself was highly politicized, Coetzee’s 1983 novel Life & Times of Michael K produces an anti-politics of hunger, whose autonomy rests in the disjuncture between its white author and its Coloured protagonist. Pursuing this argument through a genetic reading of the novel’s drafts, this chapter shows how this novel was written out of and against both the debates about art and politics in apartheid-era South Africa, and the emerging theoretical positions that governed Coetzee’s international anglophone academic context at this moment.