"Ensnared in Implication": Writing, Shame, and Colonialism

Shame, writes Timothy Bewes early in this thought-provoking study, is "an experience of the dissolution of the consolation of forms" (46). Bewes takes postcolonial literature as his primary example, for "the postcolonial situation is a world in which aesthetic forms are defined, as well as justified, by their representational and ethical inadequacy" (47). Yet as he recognizes—and such a recognition is a strength of the book as well as a feature that may raise questions—the postcolonial situation is not "unique" in this way. Much the same has been famously claimed about post-Holocaust writing by an illustrious series of thinkers, from Theodor W. Adorno, whose comments on "poetry after Auschwitz" have defined a field of inquiry (and controversy), to Primo Levi, whose reflections on the Muselmann have inspired Giorgio Agamben and many others interested in testimony (20-21). Such post-Holocaust worries about representational adequacy are, as Bewes asserts, comparable to "the aporia of impossibility with which Gayatri Spivak, with her question 'Can the subaltern speak?' characterizes the situation of the postcolonial writer, critic, and theoretician" (58). Furthermore, the inadequacy of form and the dissolution that attends it has struck not just writers directly facing historical catastrophes such as colonialism and genocide. Bewes also references "Lukács's idea of the novel as the form of 'the age of absolute sinfulness'" and "Deleuze's framing of literature with the phrase 'the shame of being a man'" (58). Analogies between such positions are not themselves news; the force of Bewes's intervention lies in the hypothesis that it is precisely shame that serves as "an index of the inadequacy or the impossibility of writing." And shame, in the expansive understanding made available by Bewes's book, cuts across multiple versions of the crisis of representation.

Because the experience of dissolution has been so widespread in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it follows that the forms touched by this dissolution are also legion. Although dedicated especially to exploring the contemporary novel, Bewes has a much more expansive notion of form in mind throughout his book. "[N]ot limited to literary form," this notion "includes ideas, habits of thought, clichés, acts of violence, and concepts in general: 'fatness,' 'terrorism,' basic racial categories such as black and white, as well as gender categories" (46). Such an all-encompassing notion of form suggests the high intellectual stakes of The Event of Postcolonial Shame, but the generalizing concatenation of thought, action, and "concepts in general" into a singular site of concern might also awaken watchfulness on the part of the reader.

Despite a title that seems, at first glance, to suggest a concern with historicity, The Event of Postcolonial Shame moves away from historicism and toward an exploration of structural logics that Bewes describes as possessing a very wide—if not totalizing— purview. The "event" at issue is conceived in Deleuzian terms and not linked to an actual break between the colonial and the postcolonial. Like many other critics, Bewes is rightly dubious about the rupture implied by the "post" in postcolonial, but in this case more because of a thoroughgoing skepticism about whether freedom can be "instantiated" at all than because of the particular trajectories of formerly colonized nations in a neocolonial world. In fact, Bewes's work cuts against the grain of recent tendencies in postcolonial studies that have moved in the direction either of historicism and localism or of charting concrete translocal and transnational networks. Instead, with its debt to Gilles Deleuze and its refusal to locate itself in a narrow geographical terrain or single historical moment, The Event of Postcolonial Shame sets out on its own path.¹ 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...