Karl Marx View on Shame as a Social Emotion - 1312 Words

In Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, he asks of a specific reader, (Europeans who were complicit in, or beneficiaries of, colonialism) to, â€Å"Have the courage to read this book, for in the first place it will make you ashamed, and shame, as Marx said, is a revolutionary sentiment†. Here Sartre must be referring to Karl Marx’s 1843 letter to Arnold Ruge regarding the French revolution. Marx says that the despotic government of Germany ought to cause Germans to feel ashamed. He contends that revolutions are not ‘made by shame’, but that ‘shame is a revolution in itself’ as a ‘kind of anger turned in on itself’. For Marx, shame is thus a social emotion. For the purposes of this essay I will investigate how ‘shame’ as defined by Marx here, is a rather pertinent alternative to the notion of guilt, especially concerning postcolonial discourses. I will also recognise the problematic ways in which postcolonial shame can operate as articulated by Sara Ahmed in Declarations of Whiteness, where she argues that the utterance of shame or guilt is non-performative. The recognition of shame – or shame as a form of recognition – comes with conditions and limits, which I will explore through the writings of black feminist writers such as bell hooks, Toni Morrisson and Audre Lorde. I will begin my investigation of the difference between shame and guilt by looking at the film by Steve McQueen, ‘12 Years a Slave’ a film-adaptation of the 1853 memoirShow MoreRelatedAldous Huxley s Brave New World3277 Words   |  14 Pagesthey decide what people s social rank will be before they are even born. With the idea that there can be â€Å"no stability without social stability,† the World Controllers create a very strict social order (Huxley). 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