Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature

"Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature provides a new and wide-ranging appraisal of shame in colonial and postcolonial literature in English. Bringing together young and established voices in postcolonial studies, these essays tackle shame and racism, shame and agency, shame and ethical recognition, the problem of shamelessness, the shame of willed forgetfulness. Linked by a common thread of reflections on shame and literary writing, the essays consider specifically whether the aesthetic and ethical capacities of literature enable a measure of stability or recuperation in the presence of shame's destructive potential. The obscenity of the in-human, both in the colonial setting and in aftermaths that show little sign of abating, entails the acute significance of shame as a subject for continuing and urgent critical attention." -- Provided by publisher Cover 1 Half Title 2 Series Page 3 Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Contents 6 List of Contributors 8 Acknowledgements 12 Introduction: Shame, Literature, and the Postcolonial 14 1 Writing in, of, and around Shame: J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K 56 2 Cursing the Fathers’ Curse: A Tragic Reading of White Shame in J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country and Age of Iron 70 3 Dictator Games: On Shame, Shitholes, and Beautiful Things 104 4 “Unfinished Business”: Digging up the Past in Christine Piper’s After Darkness and Cory Taylor’s My Beautiful Enemy 119 5 Different Shades of Shame. The Responsibilities and Legacies of a Shameful History in Australian Fiction 135 6 Contemporary Australian Refugee Policies and Shame as Reflected in A.S. Patric’s Black Rock, White City (2015) 151 7 American Postcolonial Shame, Fiction, and Timothy Bewes 172 8 “Like solemn Afro-Greeks avid for grades”: Individual and Historical Shame in Walcott’s Earlier Poetry 189 9 Shame, Justice, and the Representation of Violence in Postcolonial Literature: The Case of Caryl Phillips 206 10 Afterword: A Swarm of Locusts Passed By 222 Index 238