Shame, the affect of indignity, alienation and inferiority, is frequently wielded as a form of social control. At the turn of the 20^th century, W.E.B Du Bois attested to the devastating psychic effects of racial shame in his famous theory of double-consciousness. Less well known is the fact that he wrote an essay entitled “On Being Ashamed of Oneself,” in which he discussed the ‘secret shame’ and the ‘stigmata of degradation’ of being black in America in the 1930s. Two decades later in Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon graphically exposed the traumatic impact of the internalisation of racial shame, which he saw as directly related to the cultural impositions of what he termed “the burden of corporeal malediction.” Nevertheless, while shame continues to be central to the traumatic consequences of racism, most scholarly work still ignores its material and psychic effects that so frequently result from the unequal racial power structures that underpin Western culture.

Yet if human rights are predicated upon the freedom to define a sense of self and on an intrinsic belief in human dignity, then the right to freedom from shame should be fundamental to the construction of subjectivity regardless of racial positioning. In her highly acclaimed postcolonial novel, The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy deconstructs the psychic legacies of shame that accompanied British colonialism and its aftermath. Her resistant narrative exposes the insidious damage of Anglophilia and literally performs and engages with racial shame in a way that offers a path beyond the destructive stasis of the affect.