Postcolonial theory has largely remained suspicious of empathy for the latter’s putative embedment in the homogenizing tendencies of universalism that have fueled (neo)imperial-colonial discourse since the Enlightenment. This skepticism against empathy goes hand in hand with postcolonial theory’s investment in the Levinasian-Derridean conception of alterity as the site of ethics as well as its critique of othering or the production of “the other” through selective exaggerations and erasures of difference. Accordingly, postcolonial theory has worried that claims of empathic understanding risk subsuming differences of lived experience and cultural contexts, often in service of the dominant subject’s sense of epistemic, affective, and moral well-being.
However, as key empathy theorists such as Suzanne Keen and Patrick Hogan have asked, does postcolonial theory’s aversion to empathy stem from a tendency to read all empathic exchanges as instances of “false empathy” and all universals as manifestations of Eurocentrism masquerading as “pseudo-universalism”? How can a critical consideration of empathy – that allows for the possibility of sharing others’ experiences without discounting their irreducible singularity – revitalize postcolonial theory’s conceptualization of the self-other relationship? Conversely, how can the crucial insights of postcolonialism enhance empathy studies, which, in its affinity with cognitive and affect studies, psychology, and the neurosciences, has sometimes attended inadequately to the cultural politics of empathy? These questions serve as the framework for this panel, which seeks to redress the insufficient interaction between postcolonial and empathy studies.
Although investigations of postcolonial empathy remain limited, this panel builds upon recent important works that have considered the complex relationships between empathy and (neo)colonial constructions of power and (inter)subjectivity. Suzanne Keen’s seminal Empathy and the Novel (2007) is particularly significant in this regard; other important works that have examined the relationship between empathy and empire (broadly understood) include: Marcus Wood’s Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (2002), Carolyn J. Dean’s The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust (2004), Amy Shuman’s Other People’s Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy (2005), Rebecca Mitchell’s Victorian Lessons in Empathy and Difference (2011), Rajni Srikanth’s Constructing the Enemy: Empathy/Antipathy in US Literature and Law (2012), Carolyn Pedwell’s Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (2014), Tim Gauthier’s 9/11 Fiction, Empathy and Otherness (2015), and Chielozona Eze’s Ethics and Human Rights in Anglophone African Women’s Literature: Feminist Empathy (2016).
The papers in this panel are attuned to this broad landscape of empathy studies, even as they situate themselves in particular subsets of the conversation. For instance, Gaura Narayan’s paper, “Sisters Under the Skin: Re-writing the Other in Fantasia,” joins works of feminist literary criticism, such as Judith Gardiner’s Rhys, Stead, Lessing and the Politics of Empathy (1989) and Clare Hemmings’ Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (2011), to consider formations of empathy across intersectional gendered experiences. Narayan draws on Cathy Caruth’s conception of trauma as a link between cultures to argue that the empathic connections between Algerian and French women in Assia Dbejar’s Fantasia mark a limit to notions of otherness imposed by the French male chroniclers of Algerian history. Specifically, Narayan shows how Djebar’s resistive writing undoes the epistemological violence of the double aphasia of the postcolonial Algerian woman and re-presents her as a subject of history capable of forging empathic relationships that contest the confines of othering.
Relatedly, Laura Thorp’s paper, titled “Postcolonial Empathy: Abjection, Otherness, and Solidarity in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies,” argues that ethical forms of empathy require recognizing and engaging with the abject of the other – the “waste matter” that can neither be ignored nor incorporated into the self. She suggests that Ghosh’s novel posits such empathic exchanges as sites of counter-hegemonic solidarities that enable caring for the homologous but non-identical colonial injuries of others. In addition to invoking the psychoanalytic works of Kristeva and Lacan then, Thorp also contributes to scholarship on the role of empathy in the ethics of care and solidarity, building on works such as Michael Slote’s The Ethics of Care and Empathy (2007) and Anthony Clohesy’s Politics of Empathy: Ethics, Solidarity, Recognition (2013).
The third paper, Sean Weidman’s “Decolonial Empathy: EM Forster, Rabindranath Tagore, and the Politics of Welcoming,” draws on the works of Pheng Cheah and Kwame Anthony Appiah to explicate the crucial role of empathy in the cosmopolitan welcoming of others. More specifically, Weidman’s paper resonates with Leela Gandhi’s Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin de siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (2006), as it examines the challenges of mobilizing empathy as reparative social mechanism in order to consider cosmopolitan possibilities within the context of decolonial nationalism. Weidman focuses on representations of the Kolkatan adda, as a social space that shaped national discourses, to suggest that the adda functioned as a kind of ritual of tormented empathy.
Finally, this panel turns to its respondent Patrick Hogan, who will comment on the panelists’ papers and offer his own thoughts on the relevant scholarly conversation. Hogan’s work has made significant interventions in cognitive studies of emotion and narrative, as well as postcolonial studies – as evidenced by influential publications such as The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion (2003) and Imagining Kashmir: Emplotment and Colonialism (2016) – making him an apt interlocutor for this panel. In particular, his work on “literary universals” and essays such as “The Epilogue of Suffering: Heroism, Empathy, Ethics” and “The Psychology of Colonialism and Postcolonialism: Cognitive Approaches to Identity and Empathy” directly address the theoretic debates underpinning this panel.
To ensure sufficient time for discussion, the speakers and the respondent will be restricted to a strict 14-minute time limit after brief introductions are made within 4 minutes. Expanding the conversation around postcolonial empathy, this panel also speaks to the MLA 2020 presidential theme of “being human,” as it considers the connections and disjunctions inhabiting the self-other relationships that constitute the human condition.