Empire, Definition, and Identity: Concepts in Waiting for the Barbarians and "Stranger in the Village" Gulfam Dhillon College

History, empire, and the individual are all in a strained relationship. Empire functions by organizing, structuring, categorizing, and separating its peoples into different disciplines of the empire for the purpose of efficiency. This creates problems for the individuals under the Empire, individuals become cogs in a system like this. What effects does an empire have on the individuals that dwell under it? Even after an empire dissolves, what effects are left in the empire's historical wake? It is empires categorization and defining of people that creates a cruel pathology in the bureaucracy of empire to shun its people. As Coetzee wrote in Waiting for the Barbarians, “The Empire does not require that its servants love each other, merely that they perform their duty” (6). Empire not only affects the individuals that support the Empire but the people Empire forcibly takes for the purpose of Empire, fall into a similar more devastating fate - slaves and their future kin meet this fate in America. Empire categorizes and defines what it takes to easily manage it and create a more efficient system, this allows for people to be defined one way. In war, this occurs. The enemy is defined one way, in Coetzee’s hypothetical world the...