Event of Postcolonial Shame

Timothy Bewes is associate professor of English at Brown University. He is the author of "Cynicism and Postmodernity" and "Reification, or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism".

• 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 Cliche: 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, Zoe 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 Zoe 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 fantome 178 Towards Postcolonial Writing 187 Notes 193 Index 219

"Bewes has established himself as a leading theorist of negative affect... Bewes's account of the materialization of shame that is less communicative than affective, and thus potentially transformative, should interest readers across the humanities and social sciences."--Choice "Whether one finds that Bewes's move to the structural level opens up new horizons for literary study or abstracts too decisively from historical situatedness will depend on one's theoretical inclinations. For readers of either proclivity, however, his intelligent and original book is likely to elicit a lively and engaged response."--Michael Rothberg, Project Muse "Bewes book constitutes a welcome and original intervention in postcolonial theory, and the questions he asks go to the heart of the postcolonial dilemma... These questions are crucial, and Bewes' vision of 'a writing freed from the shaming, subtractive consciousness of a being who writes' surely points us in the right direction."--Ursula Kluwick, Project Muse "Compelling, probing, and conceptually masterful."--David James, Twentieth-Century Literature "There is much to be said in praise of Bewes' achievement in this work. The theoretical structure he proposes is outlined with admirable clarity in its opening sections, in clear prose that should be a model for academic writing. Each chapter refines and embellishes this theoretical structure, building logically on the work of preceding chapters and towards those that follow. Each theoretical innovation is elucidated through a textual encounter, and in each case the result is a strikingly original reading of a canonical postcolonial novel... What he provides us with here is nothing less than a groundbreaking new theory of the novel."--Tom Langley, Interventions "Few books published recently in the field of postcolonial studies can rival the virtuosic brilliance of Timothy Bewes' The Event of Postcolonial Shame. Dense, challenging and thought-provoking, the work's dazzling erudition, which combines highly inventive readings of an impressive array of philosophers, writers, literary and cinematic texts, opens new critical inroads into the relation between ethics and aesthetics... By framing and asking a set of fresh and inventive ones, Timothy Bewes challenges us with the task of creating a more rigorous intellectual engagement with the aesthetics and ethics of postcoloniality. The Event of Postcolonial Shame is a remarkable and stunning work of scholarship."--Raji Vallury, New Formations