In a postcolonial world, where structures of power, hierarchy, and
domination operate on a global scale, writers face an ethical and
aesthetic dilemma: How to write without contributing to the inscription
of inequality? How to process the colonial past without reverting to a
pathology of self-disgust? Can literature ever be free of the shame of
the postcolonial epoch--ever be truly postcolonial? As disparities of
power seem only to be increasing, such questions are more urgent than
ever. In this book, Timothy Bewes argues that shame is a dominant
temperament in twentieth-century literature, and the key to
understanding the ethics and aesthetics of the contemporary world.
Drawing on thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Theodor
Adorno, and Gilles Deleuze, Bewes argues that in literature there is an
"event" of shame that brings together these ethical and aesthetic
tensions. Reading works by J. M. Coetzee, Joseph Conrad, Nadine
Gordimer, V. S. Naipaul, Caryl Phillips, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Zoë
Wicomb, Bewes presents a startling theory: the practices of postcolonial
literature depend upon and repeat the same structures of thought and
perception that made colonialism possible in the first place. As long as
those structures remain in place, literature and critical thinking will
remain steeped in shame.
Offering a new mode of postcolonial reading, The Event of Postcolonial
Shame demands a literature and a criticism that acknowledge their own
ethical deficiency without seeking absolution from it.
