This book proposes a new departure point for the investigation of transnational literary
alliances: the traumatic constellation of translatio imperii which followed the dissolution of
the East-Central European empires in the 1920s and the crumbling of the West European colonial
empires in the 1950s. To prevent their breakdown the former transitioned from a 'sovereign' to
a 'disciplinary' mode of administration of their peripheries the latter from the merciless
assimilation of their colonial constituencies to their affirmative regeneration. This book
treats Franz Kafka as the writer of the first transition prefiguring J. M. Coetzee as the
writer of the second. In a series of close readings it investigates the particular ways in
which the restructuring of power relations between the agencies in their fictions is a response
to the delineated post-imperial reconfiguration of the new countries' governmental techniques.
By displacing their narrative authority beyond the reach of their readers they laid bare the
sudden withdrawal of transcendental guarantees from the world of human commonality. This
entailed an unstable and elusive configuration of their fictional worlds as a key feature of
post-imperial literature.
