ABSTRACT
Timothy Bewes’s afterword revisits his 2011 book The Event of Postcolonial Shame in the light of academic reviews of the book and other responses. The first half of the essay reprises the book’s argument for paying formal attention to the privileged object of postcolonial literary studies: the novel. Citing an essay in which Rita Barnard counterposes Bewes’s treatment of shame in works of fiction to a nonfiction work by Jonny Steinberg, the second half turns to an ethnographic work that was only briefly discussed in The Event of Postcolonial Shame, Michel Leiris’s Phantom Africa, in order to address how the mode of liberation from postcolonial shame that he earlier identified in works of fiction might also pertain in nonfictional works.
