Embodied Resistance, Ethics of Opacity, and Critical Fabulation in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe: A Retelling of Danial Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe

Abstract

This paper analyzes J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) as a decolonial retelling of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). It focuses on how Coetzee critiques colonial historiography through silence, embodiment, and narrative fragmentation. The study Employs Frantz Fanon’s ‘phenomenology of the racialized body’, Édouard Glissant’s ‘right to opacity’, Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s ‘silencing the past’, and Saidiya Hartman’s ‘archival violence’ and ‘critical fabulation’. The paper argues that Foe redefines retelling as an ethical practice that resists colonial logocentrism through representing silence both as a historical crime to mask colonial violence, and as a form of resistance. The paper approaches retelling from a new perspective that emphasizes ethics, embodiment, and opacity, and it shows how Coetzee refuses to participate in the colonial logic of storytelling altogether. This shift enables engagement with retelling from a new perspective while staying connected to core questions of narrative authority and revision. The paper posits that Foe breaks down the colonial logic of Robinson Crusoe by centering Friday’s embodied resistance and Susan Barton’s ethical failures. While postcolonial scholars frequently frame Friday’s silence as a symbol of subaltern erasure, this paper argues that Friday’s resistance lies not in speech but in his refusal to be legible. Coetzee challenges Defoe’s imperial storytelling, offering a model of postcolonial literature that prioritizes ambiguity and resistance over mastery. The paper contains two parts: the first part is an illustration of the theoretical approach. The second part discusses evidence of colonial historiography in Robinson Crusoe, followed by a decolonial analysis of its retelling in Coetzee’s Foe.