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 Zoe 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."
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