John Coetzee’s writings represent the ethical turn in postcolonial literature that took place around 1990s. After him, postcolonial writing has shifted its focus from politics to ethics. This turn paralleled the same trend within the domains of post⁃ modernism and poststructuralism. Coetzee’s writings are deeply affected by the narratives of holocaust which is central to the thoughts of thinkers such as Derrida, Levinas, Lyotard and Agamben who have successfully established the event as an absolute philosophical event. Coetzee’s writings emerged in the intersection of postcolonialism, postmodernism and poststructuralism. In a sense the body of postcolonialism’s ethical turn can be read as a response to the Adornoian claim“to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”in the context of postcolonial societies.
