Habitus and Productive Shame in Life & Times of Michael K: Embodied Ethics and the Postcolonial Subject

Abstract

This paper explores the interplay of habitus and productive shame in J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K as a means of interrogating postcolonial identity and ethical subjectivity. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and recent theories of affect and moral emotions, the study examines how the protagonist Michael K embodies an alternative ethical stance rooted not in resistance or rebellion but in stillness, silence, and bodily withdrawal. Rather than reading Michael K as a passive or defeated figure, the paper argues that his choices reflect an embodied ethical response to systemic violence and dehumanization. Using a close textual analysis of Coetzee’s minimalist narrative style, the paper identifies moments where shame functions not as a debilitating emotion but as a generative force—disrupting social expectations, questioning institutional norms, and reconfiguring the subject’s relation to space, labor, and autonomy. The analysis further reveals how Coetzee’s sparse prose mirrors Michael K’s physical fragility and spiritual resilience, constructing a politics of quiet refusal that transcends the binaries of colonizer and colonized, victim and hero. The results suggest that Life & Times of Michael K enacts a poetics of ethical minimalism, where the protagonist's apparent disengagement becomes a critique of performative resistance and a rethinking of what it means to be human in a broken world. This reading not only contributes to postcolonial literary criticism but also offers new directions for ethical inquiry in literature, foregrounding affect and embodiment as critical categories of analysis.