TITLE:
Post-Apartheid Power Reconfiguration: The Fall of White Power and the Rise of Black Agency in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
AUTHORS:
Qingdan Zhao
KEYWORDS:
J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace, Foucault, Power Inversion, Post-Apartheid South Africa
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.14 No.9,
September
7,
2026
ABSTRACT: Drawing on Michel Foucault’s analytics of power, this paper investigates the collapse of white hegemony and the rise of Black agency in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace through a tripartite inversion of power covering epistemic authority, sexual violence and land property. The analysis distinguishes Foucault’s disciplinary power, sovereign power and biopower to interpret the power shifts in post-apartheid South Africa. David Lurie’s Western literary knowledge once serves as a disciplinary tool to dominate his student Melanie, yet such white intellectual privilege is gradually replaced by Petrus’s embodied rural experience. Lurie’s discursive exploitation contrasts sharply with Lucy’s gang rape, a typical manifestation of sovereign power that reverses colonial bodily oppression. Later, Petrus integrates disruptive sovereign violence into biopolitical governance and gains full ownership of the farm. The study concludes that the racial power transition portrayed in the novel does not mark the end of historical oppression. Instead, it forms a recurring cycle of domination, in which certain formerly marginalized groups inherit and reproduce the original logic of dispossession and control. This integrated Foucauldian framework fills the gap of fragmented theoretical application in existing studies of the novel.