{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02888237756383424, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0016743407283382169, 'mean_word_length': 5.2894736842105265, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Inlays of subjectivity: affect and action in modern Indian literature

Fanon’s work on shame and the impact of race and otherness on his ontological being. This introductory discussion also takes in Levinas’s notion of nudity, visibility, and invisibility, as well as Achille Mbembe’s account of the “colonial condition”: as the editors finally assert, “the gesture of shame in literature – and particularly in postcolonial literature, given its reactive, political vocation – is a necessary stage of deep reflection, re-orientation and change” (20). The edited collection therefore seeks to bring together a “multivocal approach to such a complex and thorny matter” (29), although the editors are also clear from the outset that the volume limits itself to the literature and territories of South Africa and Australia. The chapters offer critical readings of shame in these two different contexts. Of South African texts, these include Derek Attwell’s own chapter on the politics of individual shame in J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K; Susanna Zinato’s interpretation of J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country and Age of Iron as a commentary on inherited guilt, ugliness, and shame; and Rita Barnard’s exploration of shame and shamelessness in a colonial and postcolonial setting through a cogent reading of Dinaw Mengetsu’s The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears. Of Australian literature, Sue Kossew offers an insightful reading of Christine Piper’s After Darkness and Cory Taylor’s My Beautiful Enemy – two novels about Australian internment camps during World War II – as explorations of shame and guilt associated with repressed memories, while Annalisa Pes’s reading of Katharine Prichard’s short stories and Kate Grenville’s novel, Sarah Thornhill, underlines the shame of white Australian identity by delving into early settlement and the persecution of Indigenous people. Racial shame is at the forefront of this collection’s analysis, as the authors grapple with duality and inferiority. Dolores Herrero’s discussion of the shameful treatment of refugees in Australia adds another dimension to the volume, as shame becomes a sentiment shared by those who shame others and those who are ashamed themselves. Overall, this volume presents a much needed reflection on the history, politics, and aesthetics of shame, and the wider repercussions and politics of regret.