ABSTRACT
What does it mean to claim an identity through shame? How does national shame work to acknowledge past wrongdoings, whilst absolving individuals of guilt? In this chapter, I examine not so much how shame is ‘felt’ by nations, but how declarations of shame can bring ‘the nation’ into existence as a felt community. In the quotation above, the nation is represented as having a relation of shame to the ‘wrongfulness’ of the past. Shame becomes crucial to the process of reconciliation or the healing of past wounds. To acknowledge wrongdoing means to enter into shame; the ‘we’ is shamed by its recognition that it has committed ‘acts and omissions’, which have caused pain, hurt and loss for indigenous others. The presumption of an essential relation between recognition and shame is shared by Raimond Gaita, who argues that: ‘Shame is as necessary for the lucid acknowledgement by Australians of the wrongs the Aborigines suffered at the hands of their political ancestors, and to the wrongs they continue to suffer, as pain is to mourning’ (Gaita 2000a: 278; see also Gaita 2000b: 87-93). Our shame is as necessary as their pain and
chapter 5
suffering in response to the wrongs of this history. The proximity of national shame to indigenous pain may be what offers the promise of reconciliation, a future of ‘living together’, in which the rifts of the past have been healed.
