In the framework of the seminar series, “Postcolonial Perspectives – Postdependence Entanglements” at Warsaw University on November 19, Tamta Khalvashi presented her forthcoming book, “Peripheral Shame: Affective City and Nation on the Edge of Postcolonial Georgia”.

Based on the forthcoming book Peripheral Shame: Affective City and the Nation on the Margins of Post-Colonial Georgia, Tamta Khalvashi explores post-Soviet Georgia as a unique postcolonial space that gives rise to an affective condition of peripheral shame. By mixing family archives and autoethnographic reflections with traditional fieldwork material, she follows glimpses of this shame in various urban settings, from the monuments on the move to indebted houses or from unburied bodies of Soviet mass killings to awkward coexistence of different religious and ethnic groups in urban courtyards of Batumi on the western edge of Georgia. Khalvashi offers a new way of conceiving shame, not just as a feeling of stratified geopolitical, social, or personal relations but as an impulse to straddle with or repair ongoing peripheral frictions. She thus approaches shame as a productive feeling, giving rise to inconvenient coexistence as the only way of living on the margins of the postcolonial world.