“We are all souls”: Dogs, dog-wo/men and borderlands in Coetzee and Tyulkin

Abstract

Examining the notion of “dog-men” in Coetzee’s Disgrace and Tyulkin’s documentary Not about Dogs, I argue that when the main characters become dogmen and dog-women they share with dogs the status of subaltern border-creatures. I view the spaces in the Eastern Cape and eastern Kazakhstan as borderlands which parallel the mythic lands of Dog-men from White’s anthropological study Myths of the Dog-man. These spaces of human-dog interactions, in turn, relate to Foucauldian heterotopias as sites that establish alternative modes of power relations.

Keywords: borderlands; dog-man; heterotopia; marginality