Abstract
Fictions that deal with humanitarian crises and efforts to alleviate them are commonly acknowledged to present problems: why fictionalize real people’s suffering? Aware of such critique, writers in this area often make the failure of their effort an integral part of their work. Timothy Bewes (2011) has recently theorized that postcolonial writing incorporates a failure of form which he terms ‘shame’, a gap between the writing of postcolonial critique and the inability to transcend and master the history of colonialism. This chapter speculates that Bewes’s shame could potentially also be applied to texts dealing with humanitarian crises, using as representative examples Zimbabwean Mashingaidze Gomo’s verse novel A Fine Madness and the Australian-Canadian television film Answered by Fire, set in East Timor.
Key authors, texts, case studies or examples: Timothy Bewes (theory, 2011); Mashingaidze Gomo’s novel A Fine Madness (2010); Australian-Canadian television film Answered by Fire (2006).
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Callahan, D. (2017). The Production and Productivity of Humanitarian Fiction: Postcolonial Shame and Neocolonial Crises. In: Martín-Lucas, B., Ruthven, A. (eds) Narratives of Difference in Globalized Cultures. New Comparisons in World Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62133-3_3
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