The Politics of Shame in Intercultural Education

Abstract

How do shame and pride politics police the terms of belonging to a nation-state and work to bring a nation together as a felt community? How does the ideological role of schools seek to eradicate shame via an erasure of certain histories and the sanitization of past wounds inflicted on marginalized others? Can intercultural education help to heal past wounds through a different understanding of shame, a potentially productive one? In contemporary debates on the place of shame in political life, there seems to be a clear boundary between shame and pride; shame is considered a destructive emotion that needs to be avoided while pride is promoted as a salutary emotion that serves as a legitimate force of nation building (Tarnopolsky, 2004). This dichotomy between shame and pride, argues Tarnopolsky, is not only oversimplistic but also arises out of an inadequate understanding of shame and its place in politics. Similarly, the place of shame in educational discourses is not only undertheorized and (national) pride receives an extraordinary attention compared to shame, but also there are efforts to completely erase discussions on shame via an erasure of histories of marginalized others (Fortier, 2005).