Read with Butler in mind, Coetzee's "Waiting for the Barbarians" portrays the ways an empire manufactures reality, justifying its attack on a broad, different “other” whose lives are “ungrievable” and exist only to further the narrative that the state has constructed of itself.
To those of us who lived in Europe at the time, photos of Independence Square were immediately recognizable. They represented shared wounds and terrifying possibilities for the near future.
How can you reconcile your identity as a liberating force while using the language of your oppressor and benefiting from physical freedom that many of those in your homeland do not possess? Assia Djebar wrestles with these questions in "Fantasia."
"Ditches here were layered; you got a front-line ditch, reserve line, and then artillery just outside the ditches. Each ditch was only about five feet wide, but they went on for miles to the flanks. This ditch was part of one that went clear across France and Belgium. Some people take comfort in the ditches’ snaked length, in their womb-like innards and phallic shape. At some point in the war every inch of it had been moved."
"To what extent can a still image really be held accountable for influencing the standpoint of a nation and its growing disenchantment with the Vietnam War?"
“It is unavoidable that the world would force itself into Stevens's work—one cannot live in the world and not be a part of it.” On Wallace Stevens's war poem, “Martial Cadenza.”