Interrogating Hegemony in J.M.Coetzee's Waiting For The Barbarians (1980)

European imperialism, based on the colonisation of nations from other cultures and identities, is a discriminatory ideology that creates submissive and hegemonised people. These people are oppressed, and the superiority of the coloniser is injected into their minds through the use of force. The countries from Africa to the Caribbean and India were colonised, and they were exploited economically and culturally during colonisation. The indigenous people of those territories were enslaved, and they had to serve the white masters. J.M. Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians fictionalises imperial forces' barbaric attitudes towards the people claimed to be barbarians, and it depicts their inhumane tortures against the so-called barbarians who are speculated to attack. The unnamed Magistrate and his dramatic experiences in the frontier constitute the essence of the work, and the brutality imposed on the prisoners is explicitly given. In Waiting for the Barbarians, the magistrate witnesses the tragedy and continuously interrogates his position. Regarding the colonial acts of the imperial Powers, this study will handle the common thread ideology of hegemony running through postcolonial fiction. It will shed light on the process, dating back to the colonial period, when European powers dominated other nations through violence and tyrannical attitudes. In this context, this article will represent the hegemony created by using force on the people pushed to be the other. It will crystallise hegemony and its reflections in the light of postcolonial and colonial writing, so it will recenter our attention on the colonial gaze.