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   kc4u Teacher
   College - Senior

   eNotes Editor

   The post-colonial perspective on Defoe's Robinson Crusoe stems from the strand in Post-colonial studies that goes back to the classic realist or canon making texts of the colonial culture that participate in the textual politics of colonialism by upholding or allegorizing a colonial point of view. Crusoe's relation to the Black slave Friday is the issue here. The linguistic and religious colonizations are at work in the so-called civilizing project of Friday as undertaken by Crusoe. Joyce saw Crusoe as a typical Anglo-Saxon colonist. So did the likes of Coetzee in Foe where he tries to draw our attention to the silencing of the sub-altern voice in the text. Even Marquez's The Shipwrecked Sailor has shades of Robinson Crusoe but it subverts the colonial heroism-rhetoric in Defoe's text by making it prey to an inflated media construct at the end of his novel. Crusoe's home-buliding in the island is seen as a perfect metaphor for the process of colonization. The island is also called a 'colony' late in the text.

   as far as the feminist angle is concerned, Coetzee's re-writing of it in Foe also makes gender a central issue by making a woman, who spent the days in that island with an old Crusoe and the dumb Friday, the narrator of the novel. The radical exclusion of the female which seems to characterize, typify and ground Crusoe's island-colony is inverted by Coetzee who not only inserts a woman (Susan Barton)  into the tale but lets it become her tale; told by her. That the repressive agenda of patriarchy and colonialism go hand in hand is the point driven home.

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   Posted by kc4u on Thursday November 5, 2009 at 12:50 PM