Dusklands

About “Dusklands”

J. M. Coetzee's Dusklands contains two novellas. The Vietnam Project is a five-part first-person narrative about a mythographer working for the U.S. Department of Defense in the early 1970s. His task is to write an essay on psychological colonization strategies for the Vietnamese. The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee is a first-person account of a Boer settler and six Hottentot servants on an elephant-hunting expedition in 1760, including their encounter with the Namaqua people. Both stories explore themes of colonization, the ethics of captivity, and the relationship between the writer and the written. Dusklands is a challenging debut that engages with complex ideas about history and complicity.