ABSTRACT
As I hinted at in the Introduction, shame can colour the way whole countries are thought of, and how citizens think of themselves. Contrary to the commonsense view, nationalisms are not invested solely in pride, sometimes they are intractably linked to feelings of shame. Nationalist ideology is sustained by shaming those it considers to be external to its real and imagined borders, but it saves special regard for the repudiation of its internal others, those who are considered to be supplementary to the nation’s needs, that it would prefer to make invisible or expulse. On those groups and individuals nationalism casts a particular stigma. This chapter considers one case, turning its attention to the way shame inflects ethnicity and class and produces specific kinds of narratives. Here I examine Irish-Americanism in order to unpack links between different kinds of prejudice, class hatred and homophobia, explaining how the roots of such are embedded in forms of shame.
