Vol. 2, Issue 3, Part E (2016)

Abstract
The construction of the other as hostile, strange and different is necessary for the existence of the self. The normativity of the self is always already contingent on the abnormality of the other. In Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians the construction of the myth of barbarians as deviant and living at the fringes of the empire then becomes essential for the ‘civilized’. The paper traces the process of other station in the novel via which identities are categorized and solidified.