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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.
Acknowledgments ix
Prologue 1
Part One: The Form of Shame
Chapter One: Shame as Form 11
Form and Disjunction: A Recent History 15
Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved 20
Three Preliminary Theses 23
Postcolonial Shame and the Novel 41
Chapter Two: Shame, Ventriloquy, and the Problem of the Cliché: Caryl Phillips 49
Precipitation of Shame 53
The Materiality of Postcolonial Shame 56
Cambridge and Crossing the River 61
The Poetics of Impossibility 66
Part Two: The Time of Shame
Chapter Three: The Shame of Belatedness: Late Style in V. S. Naipaul 75
Being and Belatedness 78
Late Style in Adorno 82
Liber solemnis: The Enigma of Arrival 87
Crystal of Shame: The Mimic Men 94
Chapter Four: Shame and Revolutionary Betrayal: Joseph Conrad,
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Zoë Wicomb 100
Hegel: Text as Antitext 103
Joseph Conrad: Form as the Evacuation of Form 108
Ngugi wa Thiong'o: The Imminence of Betrayal 115
Zoë Wicomb: The Difference of the Same 123
Alain Badiou: Subtraction versus Realization 128
Part Three: The Event of Shame
Chapter Five: The Event of Shame in J. M. Coetzee 137
The Problem of "Agency" 138
Two Shames in Coetzee 142
Diary of a Bad Year 146
The New Direction 150
Positively White: Slow Man and Corporeal Shame 153
Chapter Six: Shame and Subtraction: Towards Postcolonial Writing 164
The Origins of This Book: Michel Leiris 167
Deleuze and Sartre 169
Subtraction 173
Louis Malle's L'Inde fantôme 178
Towards Postcolonial Writing 187
Notes 193
Index 219
Overview
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 ...