Pub: Timothy Bewes, THE EVENT OF POSTCOLONIAL SHAME.

Bewes, Timothy.  The Event of Postcolonial Shame.  Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010.

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.

Visit: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9321.html.

"France Noire -- Black France: the Poetics and Politics of Blackness," Paris, June 6-7, 2008.

In Memoriam: Aimé Césaire, Michel Fabre, and Ousmane Sembène. The last few years have seen an extraordinary flowering of Black consciousness in France. Individuals and collectives have organized around questions pertaining to the memory of slavery, 'race' and anti-black racism, the Black condition, and what it generally means to be Black in contemporary French society. At the same time, there has been a new wave of scholarship on Blacks in Europe and a (re)theorizingof 'blackness' in the African diaspora relative to European society and history. Paris, in particular, has always been a center of Black life worldwide, from the Négritude movement of the past to the myriad formations of Black empowerment specific to this moment. On June 6 and 7, 2008, a gathering of leading international scholars will meet in Paris to examine what we identify here as 'Black France,' that is, the Black presence and condition in French society. Madame Christiane Taubira, the esteemed member of the French Parliament whose very name is now synonymous with legislation that recognizes slavery and the slave trade as crimes against humanity --The Taubira Law -- will deliver the keynote address as the prelude to an exciting and stimulating series of discussions. We encourage all those interested in the African diaspora and French society to join us for what will be an historic event. The programme may be viewed here: http://history.berkeley.edu/faculty/Stovall/conference/.

Donadio, Rachel. "Out of South Africa [Review of Coetzee's DIARY OF A BAD YEAR]." NEW YORK TIMES December 16, 2007.

This month, Viking will publish Diary of a Bad Year, the latest novel by J. M. Coetzee. With his spare prose and unsparing sense of the human condition, Coetzee is one of the most important novelists at work today. His biographical note mentions his 2003 Nobel Prize and 18 previously published books. It also presents, understatedly, a significant fact: “A native of South Africa, Coetzee now lives in Adelaide, Australia.” A host of questions lurk behind that simple sentence. Why would a novelist who has written so powerfully about the land of his birth pack up and leave? Were his 2002 move and his taking of Australian citizenship last year a betrayal of his homeland, or a rejoinder to a country whose new government had denounced one of his most important novels as racist? Was it just another example of the “white flight” that has sent hundreds of thousands of generally affluent South Africans to other Anglophone countries since the end of apartheid? Or was it a tacit acknowledgment that Coetzee had exhausted his South African material, that the next chapter in the country’s history was the rise of the black middle class, and what did an old resistance writer, with his aloof, middle-aged white narrators, know about that? . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/books/review/Donadio-t.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1198868492-SzEqy7KgVGOPTK6DCxUarw.