Wasted settlers: Soham Chakraborty, ‘Settlers and Colonialisms: Food, Waste, Abjection, and the Ethical Reconfiguration of Settler Relationalities in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians’, in Myra Hird, Cecilia Åsberg (eds), Oxford Intersections: Cultures of Waste, Oxford, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

Wasted settlers: Soham Chakraborty, ‘Settlers and Colonialisms: Food, Waste, Abjection, and the Ethical Reconfiguration of Settler Relationalities in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians’, in Myra Hird, Cecilia Åsberg (eds), Oxford Intersections: Cultures of Waste, Oxford, 2026

31Oct26

Abstract: This article examines how food and waste function as central markers of settler colonial power in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). Through an analysis of alimentary-excretory practices, the article argues that embodied distinctions surrounding eating, waste, and bodily management are crucial to the imposition and legitimization of settler colonial authority in the novel. Barbarians shows how settlers code Indigenous foodways and bodily practices as signs of barbarism, animality, and excess, naturalizing settler superiority and justifying violence against nomadic populations whose mobility threatens settler desires for xity and territorial closure. Drawing on food studies, discard studies, affect theory, and theories of abjection, the article argues that Coetzee troubles the stability of these distinctions by foregrounding the material circulation of food and waste. The magistrate’s imprisonment and exposure to hunger and waste collapse symbolic boundaries separating food and waste, human and animal, and self and other, unsettling the discursive structures that had secured his settler identity. The article argues that these experiences of abjection are not merely scenes of degradation but conditions that make possible ethical relations with historically subjugated others grounded in shared corporeal precarity. Through commensality, “eating well,” and “discarding well,” Barbarians imagines ethical relations based not on abstract recognition or liberal inclusion but on shared dependence, the discarding of hegemonic settler practices, and the risky act of sharing food across entrenched divisions. The article analyzes how Coetzee’s materialist ethics attends to the affective and alimentary infrastructures through which colonial power is lived, reproduced, and resisted.

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