Vertu du postcolonial : Coetzee

Toujours, comment le décalage de point de vue, par le géopolitique de l'Europe coloniale en ses réverbérations historiques, produit et produit des lucidités. Le capitalisme/libéralisme comme question du colonialisme (ou de l'impérialisme, en notions marxistes), la Guerre froide comme question du Tiers-Monde, etc.
Coetzee donne un insight de "Western colonial" d'Afrique ["who had grown up in a European enclave in Africa] , et d'universitaire littéraire, et d'écrivain dans l'anglais, sur le structuralisme : "What structuralism did for me - and here I have in mind anthropological structuralism and Jakobson's work on folf poetry - was to collapse dramatically the distance between high European culture and so-called primitive cultures. It became clear that fully as much thinking went into the productions of primitive cultures. Human culture was human culture, more or less, beneath the changing forms of expression. An old lesson, I suppose; but I had to learn it in my own way." ("Interview" dans le chapitre "Beckett", Doubling the Point (1992), p. 24 - plus tôt, il mentionnait Propp et le conte populaire).
Plus loin : "I did immerse myself in [Chomskyan] generative grammar, at quite a technical level. I turned - as one has to if one's interests stretch beyond the grammars of individual languages to questions of universal grammar - to non Indo-European languages. It was this immersion - shallow enough if one is talking about real command of detail - that gave the biggest jolt to a Western colonial whose imaginary identity had been sown together (how thinly, and with how many rents!) from the tatters passed down to him by high modernist art. [...] What remained from those studies was probably no more than a very general residue: respect for other cultures, respect for ordinary speakers, for the unconscious knowledge we carry, each of us." (24-25).