Shame, Literature, and the Postcolonial

After dealing with necessary terminological and methodological premises, the introductory essay starts from a general, working definition of shame to proceed, then, to qualify its use in the colonial and postcolonial context. In doing this, the existential-phenomenological model of analysis of shame provided by Sartre and reinforced, also, by Lévinas’s and Bernard Williams’s reflections, is adopted for the emphasis it gives to its relational dimension, which, once it is transposed in the postcolonial context, becomes cogently decisive. The relationship between shame and literature is considered and its postcolonial inflections examined in particular. A final paragraph is devoted to the powerful reconstructive or repairing potential of shame, to the ethics of reconciliation, and to the exploitation of the latter by recent ‘legislated’ professions of shame. The essay concludes with a synopsis of the book’s chapters.