4 The Ethics and Politics

of Traumatic Shame
Pedagogical Insights
Michalinos Zembylas

Disgrace, a novel by South African writer J. M. Coetzee, is the story of

David Lurie, a White Cape Town professor of Modern Languages who
has an affair with a Black student that ends with a sexual harassment
charge, an internal hearing, public scandal, and his resignation upon
refusing to apologize. The novel takes place in the post-apartheid set-
ting and was written during the highly mediatized proceedings of South
Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, so it resonates with the
national public spectacle of shame, confession, and forgiveness (Kossew,
2003). Toward the end of the novel, Coetzee has his protagonist visiting
his pregnant daughter Lucy, who awaits the birth of a child conceived
during a violent rape by two Black men. Lurie is certain that Petrus,
Lucy’s neighbor, is behind the attack because he wants to take over the
land. Yet Lucy agrees to marry Petrus and share her land with him in
exchange for his protection. Lurie is outraged by Lucy’s decision and
cannot understand her refusal to report the rape or to leave her land.
Lurie insists that if Lucy accepts Petrus’ offer, she would “humble her-
self in front of history” and would lose all dignity and be unable to live
with herself (Coetzee, 1999, p. 160). Lucy agrees that it is shameful and
humiliating, yet she responds, “But perhaps that is a good point to start
from again . . . To start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing
but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dig-
nity” (pp. 204–205). In her view, to be reduced to nothing and to start all
over again is the price for the past and future.
Lucy’s “nothing” is, in my view, the ultimate ground for rethinking
shame as ethical and political affect because it suggests that we are
always bound to an ethical orientation and relationality to the other that
is inescapable; part of this ethical orientation and relationality is achieved
through the unquestioning acceptance of shame. Shame, which is expe-
rienced on multiple levels and by several individuals in this novel—e.g.,
the loss of possessions; the loss of dignity and self-esteem—is tied to
unlimited responsibility for the other (Boehmer, 2002; Marais, 2000b).
The idea of shame as an affect that has important ethical and political
implications articulates “the far more painful process of enduring rather
 The Ethics and Politics of Traumatic Shame 55
than transcending the degraded present” (Boehmer, 2002, p. 343, added
emphasis) since the possibility of “adequately saying sorry” (p. 343) to
overcome shame does not exist. This position implies accepting that “per-
petrators” and “victims” (not as fixed historical identities, but as shifting
and very often interchangeable identities) are bound together in what
Woodward (2000) articulates as traumatic shame. Traumatic shame is
the “shame that cannot be transformed into knowledge” (p. 213) because
it is “the sign of a catastrophic psychic wound and a devastating rup-
ture of the social bond” (p. 236). Through such moments of disruption
and failure though, a space opens up for an alternative ethical life that
invites a starting point for a different relationality with others (O’ Don-
nell, 2017).
In this chapter, I explore the idea of traumatic shame and its multiple
manifestations and discuss possible openings for individual and social
transformation that create spaces for shame to operate pedagogically. I
have been drawn to this topic during my career because I have noticed
the ever-presence of traumatic shame not only in the context of South
Africa, which I have visited regularly for more than a decade now, but
also in my own backyard, so to speak—Cyprus, the country where I
was born and lived for most of my life, a country that is still ethnically
divided and whose communities carry the burden of trauma from past
violence. As there are multiple shames in different contexts, then there are
also different pedagogies of shame that aim at rehabilitating the politi-
cal and ethical value of shame—not by universalizing trauma, but rather
by attending to the specifics of racialized, ethnicized, and/or gendered
violence.
Hence, by pedagogies of shame, I refer to pedagogies that become
attuned to situated contexts without universalizing shame. Pedagogies of
shame are theoretically inspired by critical pedagogies understood here as
any oppositional pedagogies promoting educational experiences that are
transformative, empowering, and transgressive (Giroux, 2004; Kincheloe,
2005; McLaren, 2003). I argue that traumatic shame raises provocative
issues about the transformative possibilities that can be made available in
situations in which shame forces people to witness the limits, or even dis-
solution, of human subjectivity (Guenther, 2011, 2012).1 For example, it
is possible that recognition of shame for the injustices committed against
others may work to reconcile a nation to itself by coming to terms with
its own past (Ahmed, 2004). Or in providing opportunities for a nation
to “feel bad” about its past wrongdoings, shame may allow a nation to
consider how people change as a result of critical self-reflection (Probyn,
2000, 2005). At the same time, there are also challenging questions that
emerge from pondering the pedagogical possibilities of traumatic shame,
such as: How can spaces for witnessing traumatic shame be created in
(and outside of) schools? Is the teacher/curriculum developer positioned
as having the primary agency in producing such spaces? What are some
56 Michalinos Zembylas
possible risks or dangers in pedagogical attempts to create such spaces?
Although these questions are difficult to address in the space of a chapter,
my analysis will aim at highlighting two important insights: first, trau-
matic shame may evoke individually and socially transformative possi-
bilities around which both those shaming and those being-shamed (again
these are not essentialist categories) might meet; and second, traumatic
shame can constitute a valuable point of departure for pedagogical open-
ings that cultivate self-criticism, self-reflection, and ethical, political, and
educational deliberation.

Affect Theory and Shame

Emerging in the second half of the twentieth century, affect theory has
various manifestations and multiple disciplinary expressions from psy-
chology and philosophy to feminism, cultural studies, and postcolonialism
(see Gregg and Seigworth, 2010). In general, scholarship on the affective
turn (e.g., Bennett, 2005; Clough, 2007; Cvetkovich, 2012; Gandhi, 2006;
Sedgwick-Kosofsky, 2003) refutes hard distinctions between the world
“out there” (external) and the body (internal), acknowledging the entan-
glement between the social and the biological (and psychological). As the
groundbreaking work of Silvan Tomkins (1995a, 1995b) on affect and
shame shows, shame is a bodily affect that is profoundly social. Accord-
ing to Tomkins (1995b), shame is “an affect of indignity, of defeat, of
transgression, and of alienation” (p. 133). Tomkins locates shame at the
core of the self because of its capacity to indicate injury of the self, yet the
self does not exist in isolation, as shame is felt in the presence of a real or
imagined other. As Tomkins emphasizes, shame operates only when there
is interest involved (Sedgwick-Kosofsky and Sedgwick, 1995).
Drawing on Tomkins’ link between shame and interest, Probyn (2000,
2005) and Sedgwick-Kosofsky (2003) have furthered theorization on
affect and shame. They argue that shame represents lines of connection
between people and functions as amplification—that is, shame makes
us care about things. If we feel shame, as Ahmed (2004) asserts too, we
feel it because we have failed to approximate a social and political ideal
about the Other; thus shame is the loss of indifference. Consequently,
it may be argued that shame sensitizes us to a vast variety of actions—
actions that have either brought shame upon us or caused others shame.
But shame does more than sensitizing us; it also proposes a sensibility at
once practical and ethical because the reaction to one’s own shame can
bring a sort of self-transformation (Redding, 1999). As Probyn (2005)
writes, “[S]hame makes us question what we are feeling, the nature of the
loss of interest, and fundamentally . . . who we are, as a reevaluation of
the self” (p. 64).
Hence, it can be argued that shame is important “to discussions and
debates about how to deal with pasts that could be called shameful; and
 The Ethics and Politics of Traumatic Shame 57
to visions of life curtailed by the idea that there is something intrinsically
wrong with feeling shame” (Probyn, 2005, p. xiii). Such a view of shame
makes possible a space of solidarity that transcends feelings of resent-
ment and anger invested in past collective histories of trauma and vio-
lence. It may be said that a political and ethical account that subverts the
notion that shame is deeply shameful has important implications for the
kinds of solidarities that may eventually be built. As such, shame inter-
rupts traditional identifications (e.g., with a nation, a religion) and offers
ethical and political leverage, “one that . . . has its own, powerfully pro-
ductive and powerfully metamorphic possibilities” (Sedgwick-Kosofsky,
2003, p.  65). As Sedgwick suggests, a move away from the notion of
shame as disapproval can offer new ways of avoiding the fixation on
the dichotomy between shame-as-negative and pride-as-positive—that is,
shame does not rest on an essentialist but rather a constructive concep-
tion that is also constitutive of a kind of ethical and political subjectivity.
In contemporary discussions on shame in various disciplines, sev-
eral scholars suggest that shame works to reform ethical and political
spaces (e.g., Ahmed, 2004; Bewes, 2011; Hutchinson, 2008; Leys, 2007;
Munt, 2008; Tarnopolsky, 2010). For example, Probyn (2000) writes
about white shame and the prospects of reconciliation with Aborigines
in Australia,

being ashamed is painful, and an easy way out is to disengage from

the affect, to distance oneself from the object of shame, to fall back
on established knowledge. . . . In this way, one way out of the pres-
ent shameful conundrum is to construct Reconciliation as about two
massive and knowable blocks: whites and blacks, and worse, that the
whites are doing something for blacks. Here shame either obscures
relations of power or as a free floating sentiment can all too easily
dissipate the presumably sincere feelings of its speakers.
(p. 56)

In the above example, it is suggested that the refusal of any shame—for

instance, the shame of a nation’s past wrongdoings and the suffering of
the other—is also a refusal to make shame ours in the frst place, as ethi-
cal and political forces of transformation (Fortier, 2005).
As Probyn (2000) reminds us though, Tomkins has taught us that any
account of shame that fails to confront the problem of human suffering
is incomplete and that “the nature of the experience of shame guarantees
a perpetual sensitivity to any violation of the dignity of man” (Tomkins,
1995b, p. 136). Probyn adds that “[t]he trick then is how to direct the
intensity of shame towards constructing conditions for dignity” (2000,
p. 57). In other words, a refusal to consider that shame and dignity can be
intertwined as a result of admitting past wrongdoings and acknowledging
the commonalities between us and others prevents a unique opportunity
58 Michalinos Zembylas
for creating new social and political alliances (Fortier, 2005). Invested in
the process of eradicating shame from the collective body is a process of
preserving the polarities between “us” and “others.” The misrecognition
of the terrain of the political and social as one that sets clear boundaries
between shame and pride fails to do justice to the complexities of the
different ways that shame may work. On the contrary, the recognition of
the possibilities opened up by shame to construct conditions of dignity
may enable “a political vision of difference that might resist both binary
homogenization and infinitizing trivialization” (Sedgwick-Kosofsky and
Frank, 1995, p. 15).
Against a model that theorizes shame as “negative” or shame as merely
a bodily feeling in isolation, my point of departure is “in rethinking shame
in its differently inhabited, corporeal and historical manifestations”
(Probyn, 2000, p.  57). My ultimate focus in this chapter on traumatic
shame then raises questions about the circumstances under which differ-
ent manifestations of traumatic shame can have transformational power.
It is important to remember, as Woodward (2000) points out, that “to
argue that the affect of shame is—or can be—transformational is mis-
leading. It is not the affect itself—or by itself—that carries the potential
for transformation, although it may serve as the catalyst for it” (p. 227).
Rather, it is the ways through which we rethink shame, ethically and
politically, that create openings for transformation. As I discuss next in
my analysis of Disgrace, we can see that not all shame can be “transfor-
mational,” yet some varieties of shame may open such possibilities.

The Ethics and Politics of Shame and Redemption

in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace2
At the outset of Disgrace, the protagonist, Professor Lurie, is depicted
as a self-absorbed womanizer who routinely reduces women to objects
for the purpose of gratifying his desires. His lack of concern for others
and especially for the harassed Black student is evident in his defense of
his violation of this student, Melanie Isaacs, in terms of the “rights of
desire” (Coetzee, 1999, p. 89). Lurie is convinced that he is free to real-
ize every desire even if this means violating others’ rights. Although he
pleads guilty before the university committee, Lurie refuses to confess
and provide “a statement .  .  . from his heart” (p. 54), in a “spirit of
repentance” (p. 58). He justifies his refusal with a rationalized explana-
tion that reveals his economic understanding of justice and punishment:
“I won’t do it. I appeared before an officially constituted tribunal, before
a branch of the law. Before that secular tribunal I pleaded guilty, a secular
plea. That plea should suffice. Repentance belongs to another world, to
another universe of discourse” (p. 58).
After he loses his job, Lurie leaves Cape Town in disgrace and visits his
somewhat estranged daughter, Lucy, who is homesteading in the country.
 The Ethics and Politics of Traumatic Shame 59
There, Lurie is trying to rebuild his relationship with her while working
at the local animal clinic helping Bev Shaw to put down stray dogs. His
stay at Lucy’s farm is shattered by a brutal attack by two Black men and
a boy. The dogs are shot, Lurie is locked in the bathroom, his head is set
on fire after a bottle of spirits is poured onto it, and Lucy is raped in her
bedroom. Although Lurie thinks that Petrus, Lucy’s neighbor whom she
hires to look after the dogs, is behind the attack because he wants to take
over the land, Lucy agrees to marry Petrus in exchange for his protection.
The novel ends with the disgraced former academic fully absorbed in
his work at the animal clinic: comforting the dogs, stroking and speaking
to them in their final minutes, and giving them “what he no longer has
difficulty in calling by its proper name: love” (Coetzee, 1999, p.  219).
There is a crippled dog of which he is particularly fond, but inevitably
carries into Bev’s clinic for the final, fatal injection. The last words of the
novel sharply contrast with the first part of the novel: “‘I thought you
would save him for another week’ says Bev Shaw. ‘Are you giving him
up?’ ‘Yes, I am giving him up’” (p. 220).
Lurie’s act of giving up the dog is symbolic of the relinquishment of
desire. The man who once said that he had been “possessed” by Eros
and desire now assumes responsibility for the Other—who is not human
but the “wholly other,” as Spivak (1991) described it, in this case, the
extreme alterity of the stray dog (Boehmer, 2002). By relinquishing his
care of the lame dog, sacrificing the emotional investment he has made in
it, Lurie finds some reconciliation with himself. As Boehmer writes: “The
self that has inflicted suffering is broken down by a partially unintended
participation in suffering, and also by silently, bodily, bearing witness
to” (p. 343). While never the portrait of morality, Lurie does, by the end,
recognize that others experience suffering—a shift from his previous nar-
cissism to a nascent awareness of others (Segall, 2005).
The important transformation of (shameful) self and the recognition
of the Other’s suffering constitute important points for further analysis
of the ethics and politics of shame and suffering in this novel. As Marais
(2000a) has suggested, the dominant theme in Coetzee’s Disgrace is the
tension between desire and responsibility. This tension opens the way for
an engagement with history and otherness that is grounded in the ability
to be affected by the Other. Most importantly, in my view, the tension
between desire and responsibility is indicative of the interruption of the
political by the ethical; this is precisely where traumatic shame emerges
as an ethics and politics of alterity. Coetzee intertwines ethical issues on
shame, guilt, repentance, victimhood, responsibility, and redemption,
set against the political context of South Africa’s social transformation
(Nagy, 2004). But in a Levinasian spirit, he attempts to establish a rela-
tion with the Other as outside history and thus suggests that ethics comes
before politics. The story is not grounded in the political transforma-
tion of South Africa but in the transformation from selfishness to radical
60 Michalinos Zembylas
alterity and the responsibility toward the Other. What Levinas (1969,
1985) means by the idea of radical and infinite responsibility for the
Other is that responsibility cannot be included in a system of totality; it
cannot be constrained within the boundaries of a particular concept. This
is what Levinas calls the Other. The Other is infinitely beyond my grasp
and slips away whenever I try to reduce it to a concept in an attempt to
master or capture it. Thus, our responsibility to the Other is infinite, pre-
cisely because our learning from the Other has no limits.
It is interesting to observe, for example, that after the rape, Lurie
claims that he is too old to change, repeating this claim on a number of
occasions; yet he does change in the course of the novel, a change that
involves learning to become responsible toward the Other. He engages in
charity work at the animal clinic, putting down uncared for animals—a
voluntary task he describes as making “reparation for past misdeeds”
(Coetzee, 1999, p.  77). Marais (2000a) sees in Lurie’s offer for death
of the dog that he expresses some fondness for, “the transformation of
his desire for the Other into self-substituting responsibility” (p. 178). As
Coetzee writes: “he [Lurie] is sensible of a generous affection stream-
ing out toward him from the dog. Arbitrarily, unconditionally, he has
been adopted; the dog would die for him, he knows” (1999, p.  215).
It is significant to acknowledge that after Lucy’s rape, Lurie begins to
admit that “There may be things to learn” (p.  218). When imagining
that he will become a grandfather—Lucy decides to keep the baby after
being raped—Lurie realizes “he lacks the virtues of the old: equanimity,
kindliness, patience. But perhaps these virtues will come as other virtues
go: the virtue of passion, for instance” (p. 218). This change in Lurie’s
self-image, from the seducer to that of a grandfather, is an indication of
a series of small transformations that make him realize “that life is pre-
cious” (p. 162) and that tragedy needs to be mourned (p. 178). In this
sense, rethinking shame in its differently inhabited, corporeal, and histor-
ical manifestations, as Probyn (2000) suggests, does create openings for
moments of possible transformation—e.g., some sort of reconciliation—
“without losing sight of the conditions which have produced their spe-
cific feeling and modality” (p. 57).
To return to the incident described at the beginning of this chapter and
Lucy’s response that she would start with “nothing,” including no dignity,
Spivak (2002) contends that this word does not denote an acceptance of
rape but rather a refusal to be measured by the old epistemological value
system of “knowing the Other.” Drawing from Levinas and Derrida on
the discontinuities between the ethical and the epistemological, Spivak
suggests that literature stages powerful scenes of teaching that show us
practically these discontinuities. For example, Lucy’s “nothing” is indica-
tive of the ethical and political implications of traumatic shame through
its unquestioning acceptance. Through Lucy’s stance and Lurie’s gradual
transformation, the reader is offered an alternative perspective—that is,
 The Ethics and Politics of Traumatic Shame 61
the idea of abandoning fixation on one category and constructing a posi-
tion “that would allow the self to be within the world while viewing it
from nowhere in it. . . . Only then would history stop speaking through
the self in its predetermined relations with other beings” (Marais, 2006,
pp. 81–82).
Disgrace shows that transformation and reconciliation take place within
a context in which sufferers patiently endure pain and are ethically gener-
ous in wanting to build an inclusive society. In refusing to acknowledge
the extent of past injustice and one’s complicities within colonialism, rac-
ism, and state violence, subsequent ethical and political responsibilities
are locked into static identities of oppressor and victim, repentant and
forgiver; such moralizing approaches are clearly rejected by the novel,
which sends the message that transformation can only work if one gener-
ously gives himself to the Other. This ethics of otherness constitutes an
engagement with history that aims to interrupt all totalities (including
political ones) through one’s infinite responsibility to the Other (Marais,
2000a).
The five-volume final report of South Africa’s Truth and Reconcilia-
tion Commission as well as the academic scholarship and the numerous
literary and artistic works produced in the post-apartheid period include
striking examples of shame and forgiveness both by White and Black
South Africans in their struggles to bear witness to the trauma and suffer-
ing engendered by apartheid in South Africa. These examples invent new
forms of mourning and politically viable communities in South Africa
(Durrant, 1999, 2004, 2005) that are not locked into historicism’s desire
to hold on to an essentialist version of the past, but rather offer openings
for the hard, ongoing business left by shame and suffering.

Pedagogical Insights
What does Disgrace teach us about bearing witness to traumatic shame
and suffering? And more importantly, how can these ideas be “trans-
lated” into pedagogical insights that address traumatic shame and one’s
complicities with past shameful acts while avoiding a moralizing position
of you should be ashamed! or provoking further shame?
First of all, it is important to acknowledge that traumatic shame is
not monolithic in this novel. We see the shame (or multiple shames) of
David Lurie as a “disgraced” professor, White South African, and vic-
tim of violence as very different from the shame Lucy might experience
after being raped and this as different from the shame Melanie may have
experienced as both a Black South African during/after apartheid and
as a student involved with a disgraced professor. A valuable first lesson
then is to recognize that there are multiple shames, and therefore, there
are multiple pedagogies of shame that need to remain attuned to situated
contexts without universalizing shame. In other words, different contexts
62 Michalinos Zembylas
might offer different pedagogies of shame by paying attention to the
complexities of shame and its manifestation in each instance.
For example, the trajectories of Lucy’s traumatic experiences seem
to teach us the value of resisting the process of verbalization that turns
traumatic shame and suffering into another (digestible) story—namely,
limiting traumatic shame to verbal expressions of (superficial) feelings that
ignore power relations—and so nothing changes in the end. Rather, the
inconsolable shame and suffering experienced by Lucy in Disgrace urge
us to confront the indigestible materiality of traumatic shame and suffer-
ing (Durrant, 2004). This means that traumatic shame and suffering are
endured without applying essentializing categories (e.g., Blacks/Whites;
victims/perpetrators, etc.) that often perpetuate previous injustices and
(mis)recognitions. The violated body of Lucy is not something that can
be comprehended or “digested” in any way; it can only be made visible as
endless suffering that could potentially create small openings for change.
Thus a teleological account of redemption—that is often implicit in
historicist narratives of oppression, colonization, and racism, implying
that traumatic affects can eventually be transcended—is rejected. Dis-
grace tells us that there is no easy transcendence of oppression and suffer-
ing, just as it is not easy to overcome traumatic shame and the specifics of
racialized and/or gendered violence. This idea does not reject the possibil-
ity of individual and social transformation, but rather shows that change
cannot take place unless oppressive relations of power are challenged
and subverted. A major contribution of Disgrace then is not to teach
us about recovering a history of racial oppression through merely “rep-
resenting” or “understanding” the manifestations of different shames;
rather, what is needed is to make these different manifestations of shame
the point of departure for a new level of ethical responsibility and politi-
cal community.
The theories of shame discussed earlier in the chapter help us identify
not only the complexities in different manifestations of shame, but also
the possibilities for productive engagement with shame. Tomkins reminds
us of the materiality of shame in Lucy’s visceral experiences of rape and
its aftermath; Probyn’s theorization highlights the ethical possibilities of
shame bringing a sort of self-transformation, as seen in Lurie’s life tra-
jectory throughout the novel; finally Woodward teaches us that it is not
shame itself that carries the potential for transformation, but rather the
different ways we are urged to reconsider shame that create transforma-
tive openings.
I would argue then that traumatic shame can function pedagogically in
productive ways, when we—educators, students, and laypersons—manage
to engage in critical conversations that expose the complexities of shame
and its transformative possibilities. For example, pedagogies of shame can
be productive when they identify different manifestations of shame expe-
rienced by different individuals or groups without telling moralizing
 The Ethics and Politics of Traumatic Shame 63
tales or claiming that there is (or should be) teleological transcendence
of shame. Critical theories and pedagogies are valuable tools in theoriz-
ing and practicing pedagogies of shame in schools and the public, but
pedagogies of shame take into consideration the specifics of racialized,
ethnicized, and/or gendered violence within a particular context. In other
words, different contexts offer different pedagogies of shame, but I would
highlight two important aspects of such pedagogies that emerge from
considering multiple shames in Disgrace.
First, pedagogies of shame essentially ask participants (e.g., teachers
and students) to engage in alternative ways of relating both to otherness
and history—not in the sense of recovering history from a shameful past,
representing the Other’s suffering, or even recovering from a shameful
past, but rather in the insistence on remaining inconsolable before his-
tory, traumatic shame, and suffering. For example, Disgrace does not
offer any consolation; as the different shameful and/or suffering bod-
ies in the novel attempt to mourn their own loss, they open out onto a
wider history of loss—that does not belong to them—that ungrounds
them as individuals and has the potential to create new forms of commu-
nity (Durrant, 2004). Pedagogical engagement with different manifesta-
tions of traumatic shame in the spirit of Disgrace then does not bound
teachers and students in the recovery of any historical narrative that
“explains” or “confesses” who the perpetrator is (or has always been).
This sort of pedagogical engagement is not locked in self-absorbed nar-
ratives assuming that I could do things differently to avoid my shame or
the Other’s suffering. Rather, traumatic shame, suffering, and mourning
can become the springboard of solidarity with the inconsolable demand
of the bereaved.
Second, to engage in alternative ways of relating both to otherness and
history, as noted above, it is important to create spaces for witnessing the
multiple manifestations, tensions, and complexities of shame. Witness-
ing multiple shames involves recognizing shame, suffering, and mourning
through an awareness of injustice. This entails refusing easy notions of
catharsis and reconciliation, but rather acknowledging the hard, unfin-
ished business left by unspeakable atrocities (Durrant, 2004). Against the
tendency of fixating the self and others in the historical narratives of one
social/racial/ethnic/cultural group against those of another, the process of
inconsolable mourning involves a radically different invention of com-
munity, in that it binds not simply by appealing to sameness but through
the attempt to inhabit difference (Durrant, 2005). For example, through
reading novels, learning from real-life stories from those who suffer, and
engaging with small everyday activisms, educators may create spaces for
students to become witnesses of different manifestations of shame and
inconsolable mourning and thus broaden the sense of commonality by
appealing to the “shared fact of our embodiment and thus our mortal-
ity” (Durrant, 2005, p. 447). Needless to say, responsibility to the Other
64 Michalinos Zembylas
is an interruption and not a condition for political transformation; yet
witnessing different manifestations of traumatic shame and inconsolable
mourning offers the potential for a renewed form of relationality with/to
the Other. Although there are numerous dangers, limitations, and obsta-
cles, the teacher, in my view, has considerable agency in his/her classroom
to provide openings that prepare the ground for pedagogies of shame to
flourish.
However, one danger that deserves our attention is “cheap” or “empty
sentimentality” cultivated by educational trauma tourism. The term “cheap
sentimentality” was used by Hannah Arendt (1994, p. 251) to refer to
what she saw as misplaced expressions of guilt among German youth
after World War II. “Empty sentimentality” is a similar term that refers to
a superficial feeling of empathy and solidarity with those who suffer (e.g.,
see Kaplan, 2005). In particular, there are two risks with leaving the door
open for cheap sentimentality to intrude within a pedagogy of shame.
First, by sentimentalizing suffering, it is likely to neglect the material/
structural conditions of inequality; second, sentimentalization may even-
tually cultivate pity rather than affective solidarity, which reinscribes
dominant power relations (Zembylas, 2016). In other words, when con-
fined to the individual or when traumatic affects are depoliticized from
the social and political circumstances (e.g., racialized, ethnicized, and/or
gendered violence), the sentimentalization of narratives of suffering may
in fact reinforce the very patterns of economic and political subordina-
tion responsible for such suffering (Spelman, 1997).
All in all, witnessing shame in the classroom is neither about making
students feel bad about their parents’ or ancestors’ actions nor about
telling them moralistic tales of how to apologize for things that they or
others have (not) done. Witnessing shame becomes a pedagogy when it
can motivate students and educators to recapture the constructive affec-
tive connections that suffering has impeded, such as the lost sense of soli-
darity, tolerance, and compassion (Zembylas, 2006, 2019). The example
of the novel discussed in this chapter suggests that envisioning spaces of
humanity and common vulnerability and engaging in acts of affective
connectivity—e.g., acts of compassion, sociality, and dignity—are valu-
able ingredients of pedagogies of shame. Unraveling the ethical and polit-
ical complexities of different manifestations of traumatic shame—both
as analytic tools and as points of departure for cultivating individual and
collective political consciousness and self-reflection—may create peda-
gogical possibilities for leaving students and teachers “inconsolable” and
allowing them to “see” firsthand the “indigestibility” of traumatic shame
within different contexts.

The (Im)possibility of Being Taught From Shame

In this chapter, I have argued that pedagogies of shame—that is, peda-
gogical practices of reading, engaging, and learning from shame—expose
 The Ethics and Politics of Traumatic Shame 65
the complexities of multiple shames and the opportunities to experience
new relationalities with others. Pedagogical engagement with narratives
and experiences of trauma “is not a linear process but one of constant
return and reassessment” (Scott, 2001, p. 359). Spivak (1988) insists that
those who are recipients of stories such as trauma narratives have a tre-
mendous responsibility: first, not to presume that suffering can be under-
stood universally, and second, to be vigilant about misuses of such stories.
There is never anything transparent or universal about the meaning of
wound, which means that knowledge about the wound may become a
property of rhetoric (Berlant, 2000, 2001). It is precisely within this space
that traumatic shame may be translated into moralizing stories or senti-
mental rhetoric, and thus we need to be constantly vigilant.
Needless to say, pedagogies of shame must also consider the limits,
potential failures, and even impossibilities of being taught from shame in
some circumstances. For example, pedagogies of shame that are directed
primarily at a White student audience, while ignoring the emotional
burden carried by other groups, are less likely to encourage transfor-
mative insights (Zembylas, 2019). Also, pedagogies of shame that are
addressed to students who have not directly experienced the trauma of
oppression/racism/apartheid need to find powerful yet not merely sen-
timental ways to communicate emotions of trauma. There is clearly
need then to further our understanding of how shame can be taught in
different contexts. For this reason, it is important to remind ourselves
that some of the most significant insights regarding the (im)possibility
of being taught from shame might arise in moments in which there is
failure and uncertainty of pedagogies of shame. Researching such uncer-
tainties and ambiguities is a significant task in education that needs to be
undertaken in future research and scholarship. Pedagogies of shame will
undoubtedly be challenging and elusive, at times daunting or even impos-
sible, conducted in uneven educational space-times; however, they call for
revitalized pedagogical space-times that can contribute to less essentialist
versions of past traumas and more productive pedagogical insights about
shame in different contexts.

Notes
1. Clearly, there are different kinds of shame: body shaming, disability shaming,
and queer shaming, to name a few. I want to make clear from the beginning
that this chapter focuses on a specific kind of shame, namely, traumatic shame.
2. The discussion here draws on and extends my analysis in Zembylas (2009).

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