Intro -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication Page -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Prologue -- Part One: The Form of Shame -- Chapter One: Shame as Form -- Form and Disjunction: A Recent History -- Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved -- Three Preliminary Theses -- Postcolonial Shame and the Novel -- Chapter Two: Shame, Ventriloquy, and the Problem of the Cliché: Caryl Phillips -- Precipitation of Shame -- The Materiality of Postcolonial Shame -- Cambridge and Crossing the River -- The Poetics of Impossibility -- Part Two: The Time of Shame -- Chapter Three: The Shame of Belatedness: Late Style in V. S. Naipaul -- Being and Belatedness -- Late Style in Adorno -- Liber solemnis: The Enigma of Arrival -- Crystal of Shame: The Mimic Men -- Chapter Four: Shame and Revolutionary Betrayal: Joseph Conrad, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Zoë Wicomb -- Hegel: Text as Antitext -- Joseph Conrad: Form as the Evacuation of Form -- Ngugi wa Thiong'o: The Imminence of Betrayal -- Zoë Wicomb: The Difference of the Same -- Alain Badiou: Subtraction versus Realization -- Part Three: The Event of Shame -- Chapter Five: The Event of Shame in J. M. Coetzee -- The Problem of "Agency" -- Two Shames in Coetzee -- Diary of a Bad Year -- The New Direction -- Positively White: Slow Man and Corporeal Shame -- Chapter Six: Shame and Subtraction: Towards Postcolonial Writing -- The Origins of This Book: Michel Leiris -- Deleuze and Sartre -- Subtraction -- Louis Malle's L'Inde fantôme -- Towards Postcolonial Writing -- Notes -- Index.

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.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2018. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.