Peripheral Shame: Affective City and the Nation on the Margins of Post-Colonial Georgia

Abstract

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 that gives rise to inconvenient coexistence, which is the only way to live and survive on the margins of the postcolonial world.

Bio

Tamta Khalvashi is a professor of Anthropology and the Head of the PhD Program of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Ilia State University in Georgia. She obtained her PhD in Anthropology from Copenhagen University (2015). She has been awarded postdoctoral fellowships from the Fulbright Program at New York University, Department of Anthropology (2016-2017) and Cornell University, the Society for the Humanities (2022-23). Her research interests overlap experimental anthropology, the interdisciplinary field of affect theory, and cultural anthropology, focusing on postsocialist transformations, peripheral histories, marginal social identities, space, and materiality. Her article Horizons of Medea: Economies and Cosmologies of Dispossession in Georgia (Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, 2018) has been awarded Honorary Mention from Soyuz (Postsocialist Cultural Studies Research Network of the American Anthropological Association) in the Article Price Annual Competition (2018). Currently, Khalvashi is finalising her book Peripheral Shame. She is the author of A Sea of Transience: Politics, Poetics and Aesthetics Along the Black Sea Coast (with Martin Demant Frederiksen) (Berghahn 2023).