This special session includes filmic texts, war reportage, and literary texts for a discussion of the study of the marginal “other” in humanities today. If literature has the responsibility to teach empathy as a humanizing gesture, we begin from the premise that texts should be read and taught through a critical process that entails interpretation, translation, and transference in order to feel what the other is feeling, even while realizing that this is never an innocent process, for the reader’s position, understanding of facts, and cultural context affect ways in which humans experience feelings.
The three papers in this session address the study of empathy within literary texts that invoke, critique, or complicate its capacity to represent and humanize the other. Knutson's paper on “Empathy and the Human in Octavia Butler” focuses on two texts by Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Sower (1993) and The Parable of the Talents (1998). She critically studies the problem of humanistic and sentimental notions of empathy through the protagonists of both of these novels, who have a chemical condition, “hyperempathy,” that causes them to feel the full effects of others emotions. In “Parable of the Sower,” Lauren’s ownership of this condition creates instant community with those around her, since she can immediately feel the sensitivity of others. Lauren’s quick friendships prevent a great deal of violence around her in a context where almost everyone is homeless. Knutson reads these texts in the context of studies of female homeless communities, such as “Love Camp” in California, where homeless groups empower each member to support each other emotionally and physically (Row and Wolch 194), for “participation in the informal communities increase individual choice and self-determination and provide excess resources" (196). Reading Butler’s empathy through these contexts suggests that the geographical mobility of homelessness increases empathy towards the other in a non-sentimental, non-cathartic manner.
Blacksin’s paper, “Empathy-Production as Military Logic,” builds on fieldwork conducted during the siege of Mosul, Iraq. Blacksin demonstrates how the production of empathy in war reportage mystifies both the implications of humanitarian airwar and the ideology of American journalism. He argues that the narration of human suffering as corporeal, individuated, and politically vacant–depictions encouraging of the reader empathy many journalists cite as a primary goal–neutralizes interrogation of militarism and its representation. The suffering narrated from Mosul was embodied rather than abstract, universal rather than contextual, individual rather than collective, and in this way became relatable to faraway news consumers (Boltanski 1999). Those harmed during the siege figured as captives of an Islamic insurgency rather than subjects choose to stay in Mosul for reasons of economic opportunity, social ties, or communal security. For the choice to remain marks a political agency troublesome to narrative separations of victim from perpetrator, innocence from guilt, civilian from combatant, knowable from unknowable–separations critical for both journalistic empathy-production and humanitarian interventionism (Fassin and Rechtman 2009). The figure of the non-innocent victim–a victim tolerant of Islamic insurgency or opposed to US intervention–undermines audience empathy by replacing universalized and somatic suffering with contextualized and political suffering. Narrative portrayal of politicized suffering would complicate not only the elicitation of empathy but the very justification for US airwar, recasting regret for civilian suffering as the structural necessity for military punishment. In this way, journalism’s narrative conventions reproduce the logics of contemporary militarism. As empathy remains central to journalistic narration of violence, war reportage can produce only particular understandings of what violence is. By rethinking empathy-production, the ways we understand the “other” in wartime transform.
Mangharam’s paper “Feeling Racism: Empathy and Jordan Peele’s Get Out” builds on critiques of empathy as a vehicle for positive social change, in particular that it is only invoked selectively for those we know personally, or for those who resemble ourselves, and that it is a cathartic emotion that rarely translates into action to help those whose pain we feel. In the latter argument, empathy is less effective in achieving social change than a process of representative thinking that involves rationally imagining different viewpoints. Mangharam’s paper investigates whether readings of literary or filmic texts as generators and transmitters of empathy stand up to scrutiny from these positions of critique. I will focus on these questions through a close reading of a teaching session of Jordan Peele’s Get Out at a large public university in New Jersey.