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Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik |
| Original language | |
| English | |
SHAME ON ME
An Anatomy of Race and Belonging
In the way Olivia Laing explored loneliness via art in The Lonely City and Roxane Gay revealed in Hunger that "the bigger you are the smaller your world becomes", Tessa McWatt anatomizes her body to explore race and ethnicity, "untangling myth and image from skin and bone".
How do you tick a box on a census form or job application when your ancestry is Scottish, English, French, Portuguese, Indian, Amerindian, African, and Chinese? What does it mean to belong when you are a complicated hybrid of so many ethnic, national, and racial identities?
Tessa McWatt's grandmother's family fled southern China for British Guiana after her great uncle was shot in his own dentist's chair during the first Sino-Japanese war. McWatt is made of this woman and others - including those who arrived in British Guiana from India as indentured labor, and those who were brought from Africa as cargo. A tale spun of sugar - its globe-straddling exchange and its back-breaking cultivation - Shame on Me draws on the author's own multiracial identity and experience to uncover the shame of colonialism and its legacy of white supremacy.
McWatt was called "Susie Wong" as a child and has been judged not black enough by other women who assume she straightens her hair. Through a close examination of her own body - nose, lips, hair, skin, eyes, ass, bones, blood - she asks why we persist in thinking in terms of race today when racism is killing us all.
From racialization of the body and how this was used to classify slaves, to fear of blackness and the exoticism of the Asian female; from myths about what bodies can and can't do, to shadism and the paradox of the suntan; from the failure of the promised post-racial age and what we need to do to address the problem of inequality, Shame on Me is a personal and powerful exploration of history, identity, color, and desire from a writer who, having been plagued with confusion about her race all her life, has found kinship and solidarity in story.
TESSA McWATT, winner of the 2018 Eccles British Library Award, is a professor of creative writing at University of East Anglia. The author of six critically acclaimed works of fiction, McWatt is also a producer and script consultant for a film adaptation of John Berger's To the Wedding. Tessa's mixed-race parents immigrated to Canada from Guyana when she was three; she lives in London, UK.
Tessa McWatt's grandmother's family fled southern China for British Guiana after her great uncle was shot in his own dentist's chair during the first Sino-Japanese war. McWatt is made of this woman and others - including those who arrived in British Guiana from India as indentured labor, and those who were brought from Africa as cargo. A tale spun of sugar - its globe-straddling exchange and its back-breaking cultivation - Shame on Me draws on the author's own multiracial identity and experience to uncover the shame of colonialism and its legacy of white supremacy.
McWatt was called "Susie Wong" as a child and has been judged not black enough by other women who assume she straightens her hair. Through a close examination of her own body - nose, lips, hair, skin, eyes, ass, bones, blood - she asks why we persist in thinking in terms of race today when racism is killing us all.
From racialization of the body and how this was used to classify slaves, to fear of blackness and the exoticism of the Asian female; from myths about what bodies can and can't do, to shadism and the paradox of the suntan; from the failure of the promised post-racial age and what we need to do to address the problem of inequality, Shame on Me is a personal and powerful exploration of history, identity, color, and desire from a writer who, having been plagued with confusion about her race all her life, has found kinship and solidarity in story.
TESSA McWATT, winner of the 2018 Eccles British Library Award, is a professor of creative writing at University of East Anglia. The author of six critically acclaimed works of fiction, McWatt is also a producer and script consultant for a film adaptation of John Berger's To the Wedding. Tessa's mixed-race parents immigrated to Canada from Guyana when she was three; she lives in London, UK.
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Book
Published 2020-03-01 by Random House Canada |