ABSTRACT
Annalisa Pes’s chapter investigates the literary representations of shame as specifically related to the history of atrocities and rights violation against the indigenous people of Australia. In particular, it analyses some short stories by K.S. Prichard and a novel, Sarah Thornhill, by Kate Grenville. For both writers the topic of shame plays a fundamental role in the definition of white Australian identity and in understanding the relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. The reading of Prichard’s stories proves how a struggling identity, a sense of doubleness, and a profound humiliation may derive from an internalized experience of racial shame. But the courage and responsibility of denunciation can restructure the relations of self/Other by giving them alternate positions of power. Therefore, in most stories, white shaming can be counteracted by the ashamed reactions of aboriginal pride that subvert the colonial hierarchical structure of white superiority and black inferiority by means of a counter-shaming rhetorical strategy. In Grenville’s novel, where shame is differently articulated in black and white characters, and in older and younger generations, the confrontation with shame involves self-awareness and self-transformation by means of exposure and denunciation. In other words, the solution is not to relieve or absolve the sense of shame but to denounce what has provoked it, what has been concealed, and what needs to be uncovered.
