ABSTRACT
David Callahan’s chapter starts from considering how for many observers regret, guilt or shame provide modes whose objective is to speak the wounds of history so as to be able to process them better and then move past them, however imperfectly. For Timothy Bewes in The Event of Postcolonial Shame, however, “the substance of shame is fundamentally a gap, an absence, an impossibility” (39) such that postcolonial writing inevitably materializes shame as it arises from the incommensurable situations thrown up by colonial history. Bewes’s own examples, however, do not include writers from the United States. It might be said then that the absence of American postcolonial shame in The Event of Postcolonial Shame becomes the form of the book’s own shame, its manifestation of the incommensurability of the history of the United States’s own invading and colonial history. Callahan’s chapter expands upon some of the determinate absences that emerge from Bewes’s thesis when applied to certain categories of American literature, using an example taken from Indigenous writing, followed by an example of writing by the invisible category of Australian-Americans.
