What is the threshold that intervenes between one mind and another, across which the act of looking takes place?

This essay addresses this question, in relation to the work of Samuel Beckett, W. G. Sebald and J. M. Coetzee. All three writers are centrally concerned with what I here call the ‘threshold of vision’ – and for all three writers, to think this threshold requires an act of ethical imagination. This is the case for the exchange of any look between one consciousness and another; but for all three writers this exchange becomes particularly charged when it is shared between human and animal. The essay reads the act of looking through this relation between human and nonhuman, to produce a critical account of the politics of shared life, as this exceeds our given taxonomies for imagining consciousness.

Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote has exerted a unique influence on the history of the novel, because it tests, more exhaustively than any other, the bonds that tie fiction to the world that it partly invents.

This essay argues that the work of J. M. Coetzee is shaped, to a significate degree, by his long dialogue with Cervantes, which turns around a critical examination of what is here called the ‘anatomy of realism’ – the capacity of realist works of art to enter into the structuring of our life worlds. Coetzee’s engagement with Cervantes can be felt throughout his writing career, but it comes into particularly sharp relief in his later work, and particularly in his 2013 novel The Childhood of Jesus. It is in this work, the essay argues, that Coetzee’s reanimation of Don Quixote is most productive, as it reaches towards a dramatically shifted conception of realism, and of the relation between the imagination and the world.

Writing by migrant authors constitutes the bulk of Australian literature, yet more often than not ‘migrant writing’ is used as a de facto label to indicate writing by non-anglophone authors. A further distinction is made with refugee writing, which is treated as a discrete subcategory within the larger field of migrant experience. This chapter restores migrant status to that of Australian settler writing, highlighting the ways in which Australian settler identity is formed through the repression of its migrant origins. It locates this impulse to distance settler identity from migrancy in the founding doctrine of terra nullius (used to justify the British colonisation of Australia), suggesting that this might be considered as a collective trauma, a mechanism that erased not only the country’s Aboriginal history but also its migrant past. Through a comparative analysis of works by Aboriginal authors Claire G. Coleman and Alexis Wright, migrant writers J. M. Coetzee and Felicity Castagna, and the refugee journalist and autobiographer, Behrouz Boochani, this chapter demonstrates the extent to which Australia has been invented by migrants and the migrant experience.

This chapter introduces the idea of a distinctively moral form of recognition by considering J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, a work of literature that exemplifies the recognitive tensions in which Hegel is interested, showing how moral disagreement can undermine the experience of the integrity of one’s own selfhood. I then turn to presenting a general account of the issue of recognition in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, by situating the role that the idea of the self plays in addressing that issue. I show that recognition addresses a challenge about self-knowledge, so that an adequate conception of what the self is is necessary to secure relations of recognition. After clarifying the interpretive method that I follow in the book by contrasting with my own approach to extant interpretations, I conclude with a chapter-by-chapter outline of the rest of the monograph.

In this concluding chapter, I summarize the argument about the conditions for the achievement of recognition that Hegel sets out from Chapters IV-VI of the Phenomenology. I consider the ways in which the conclusions of this argument are significant for the project of the text as a whole, pointing to the role of the idea of the self both in the Phenomenology’s “Preface” and account of “Absolute Knowing,” and in the Science of Logic. At the same time, I also argue that the account of reciprocal recognition is completed in Hegel’s account of “spirit,” and so does not depend on the subsequent accounts of religion or philosophical science. I conclude by stressing the precarity of relations of reciprocal recognition which are dependent on the achievement of moral agreement.

This chapter argues that the various forms of fallibility historically identified in the genre of the essay – the tentative, the unfinished, and the imperfect – add up to a freedom from mastery that is peculiarly conducive to the consciousness of the postcolonial subject. The author examines essays by writers such as J. M. Coetzee, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, C. L R. James, Jamaica Kincaid, and Arundhati Roy.

In the Introduction I set out the argument of the book by drawing on Aristotle’s Poetics and The Nicomachean Ethics as well as on Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, to establish the central concepts by which I define the subject of postcolonial tragedy. Key operative concepts that I will incrementally expand upon in the course of the book are introduced in this chapter. These include: tragedy itself, postcolonialism, colonial interpellation, suffering, systematic delirium, postcolonial edginess and precarity, giving an account of oneself, the Akan concept of musuo, causal plausibility, suffering, unruly affective economies, and ethical choice. I also lay out very briefly what I will be doing subsequently in the individual chapters. Thus, I provide minimal synopses of chapters on Shakespeare’s Othello, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman and The Road, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy.

In Chapter 7, we find that the characters in J. M. Coetzee’s novels are afflicted by second thoughts in a manner that brings to mind the structure of sceptical interlocution and the abolition of philia that we saw in Fanon. With the particular case of the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians, this thought-affliction produces an edginess that is directly related to the character’s unerring perception of the force of the Empire’s ideology and to his sense of having been compromised for being their unwitting agent. As the novel progresses, the Magistrate’s edginess moves from being a feature of his internal interlocution to being defined by his material conditions: he is thrown into jail and tortured. It also impacts on the moral contradictions of his position – having to choose between allegiance to the Empire and care for the barbarian girl. The question of moral residue and ethical choice are carefully examined with respect to the Magistrate.

Chapter 10 lays out the primary methodological motivations behind the book. Because both postcolonialism and tragedy are highly complex, constellation concepts, I argue that they instigate the necessity for thinking closely about the dynamics of comparison, critical theory, interdisciplinarity, and the ethics of reading. I then track the complex relations between historical context and literary texts in postcolonial studies and go on to show some of the ways in which the contrast and comparison of Western notions of tragedy with postcolonial examples forces us to rethink both sides of the coin. I conclude with remarks on the characterological types we have seen in the course of the book – namely the bold (Othello, Okonkwo, Sethe) and the quiet (the Magistrate and Murphy) – and show how they correlate to two different ideas of freedom. There are implications to be derived from postcolonial tragedy for how we think of freedom in today’s world.