About the Book
Somota is society divided by change, and by memories. When A. arrives in the protectorate shortly after the first world war, he is unsure of what to expect. Employed by the government as a linguistic anthropologist, he is tasked with documenting the benefits of the new order and reporting them to the Reverend G. But what are these benefits? In his travels throughout the region, A. finds only the physical and emotional scars of conquest, and of routine colonial administration. Yet, even as the indigenous culture is being reduced to mere fragments, he also learns of a sublime literature responding to those historical traumas. One storyteller in particular, Kehinta, begins to reveal to A. just how much has been lost. A profoundly beautiful novel commenting on the horrors of colonial oppression, trauma, love, and the power of story.
About the Author :
Patrick Colm Hogan is the author of The Death of the Goddess: A Poem in Twelve Cantos (2014), a book-length, narrative poem based on Hindu Goddess myths, as well as lyric poems and short fiction, published in such outlets as minnesota review, The Journal of Irish Literature, and the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies. A Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor at the University of Connecticut, he is the author of over twenty scholarly and interpretive books, most of which treat postcolonial or world literature. Hogan regularly teaches courses in postcolonial literature (often with a focus on Africa), as well as courses on the pre-colonial and postcolonial literary traditions of India and China. In keeping with these interests, he has worked to acquire at least some knowledge of French, German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Hindi, Mandarin, and Sanskrit. A People Without Shame is his first novel.
Review :
Advanced Praise for A People Without Shame: "Imaginative and gripping." --Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; "A People Without Shame is an artistic triumph composed by a master craftsman whose courageous eye makes all too vivid the abundant horrors suffered by beautiful people and their culture at the hands of soul-dead colonizers eager to extinguish them. Patrick Hogan is - as Kurosawa says an artist must be - one who does not look away. Inside this grand and ambitious novel beats an urgent and epic dirge written with magic enough to awaken our collective humanity to the poetry preserved in the raging hearts of people whose stories refuse to die." --Matt Cashion, author of Last Words of the Holy Ghost; "Hogan's absorbing and stylistically inventive novel offers a stirring meditation on the cost of colonial appropriation. Told with visceral prose and cinematic sweep, it's also a unique tale of unrequited love. Kehinta, the guardian of her people's epic poem, is Hogan's great achievement, magnetic yet always just beyond our grasp, and A's quest to understand her - to wrest the meaning of a poem from her - brings all the twisted moralities of the colonial enterprise into razor-sharp relief." Ken Kwapis, director of The Office and He's Just Not That Into You; Praise for other books by Patrick Colm Hogan: "Formidably armed with statistics, intelligence, a relentless philosophical method... Hogan makes an excellent case [in The Politics of Interpretation: Ideology and Professionalism in the Study of Literature] that the world is a very real place which we can touch and shape with both our hands and our pens." --Times Higher Education Supplement; "From start to finish, [Joyce, Milton, and the Theory of Influence] delivers what it promises: clear, even-handed discussions of theoretical matrices; social, intellectual, and aesthetic contexts for influence; three text-based chapters showing Joyce at play in Miltonic fields... this is a first-class example of how to do a study of significant literary influence." --James Joyce Literary Supplement; "What is not in doubt [in On Interpretation: Meaning and Inference in Law, Psychoanalysis, and Literature]... is Hogan's achievement in writing a book that lives up to the high ideals of the Enlightenment." --The British Journal of Aesthetics; "This marvelous book [The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion] reconnects the study of literature to the themes that have made it eternally fascinating, and connects it for the first time to the sciences of mind and brain. It is a landmark in modern intellectual life, heralding an exciting new integration of the sciences and humanities." Steven Pinker, Harvard University; "Patrick Hogan analyzes literary works to tell the story of the annihilation of selves and the death of cultures that accompanied colonialism. But it is also a story of the emancipatory visions that have emerged from the crucibles of self-disavowal and massive cultural dislocations. [Colonialism and Cultural Identity: Crises of Tradition in the Anglophone Literatures of India, Africa, and the Caribbean] is a homage to human creativity under oppressive and humiliating conditions and to the indomitable resilience of the defeated and the forgotten." --Ashis Nandy, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi; "This sober, readable book [Philosophical Approaches to the Study of Literature] organizes and describes the connections between philosophy and literary theory with rare lucidity. --Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries; "The philosophy of ethics has been central to understanding human interaction since ancient times. Now Patrick Colm Hogan, the most important researcher in the twenty-first century on the relationships between psychology and worldwide literature, has written a fascinating update [Literature and Moral Feeling: A Cognitive Poetics of Ethics, Narrative, and Empathy]." --Keith Oatley, University of Toronto
