ABSTRACT
Rita Barnard’s chapter considers the workings of shame in Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears. Set in Washington, D.C., and narrated by an Ethiopian refugee called Sepha Stephanos, the novel is concerned with migration and gentrification. These are both processes that create frontier effects: zones where identities are shaped via a fraught negotiation of inclusion and exclusion. The chapter examines not only colonial and postcolonial sites of shame, where the affect is produced in contexts of revolution, violence, and tyranny, but also the way in which it functions in the USA, where shame is produced through the experience of racial difference, disempowerment, and a denial of the material promises of the American dream. Shame is approached in its sociopolitical dimensions and is therefore alert to the national theater of shame and blame that Donald Trump’s campaign and his presidency have initiated. The figure of the dictator is explored, as are racial jokes and slurs? not least Trump’s vicious comments on immigrants from “shithole” countries. Whereas Timothy Bewes theorizes shame in relation to writing, this chapter focuses rather on scenes of reading, like reading aloud Dostoyevski’s The Brothers Karamazov, a central event in the novel and one that enables us to imagine redemptive and moral uses of shame.
