Dr Carolyn Pedwell: Affect at the Margins: The Transnational Politics of Empathy
Date: 22 February 2012, 16:00
Location: Beech Grove House
Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies Seminar Series
Against the dominant universalist injunction to ‘be empathetic’, this paper explores the possibilities of alternative histories, practices and affects of empathy in the context of postcoloniality and neoliberalism. Offering a critical reading of Antiguan American author Jamaica Kincaid’s postcolonial text A Small Place (1988), it examines how empathy expressed at the margins of our social and geo-political imaginaries might disrupt or refigure some of the dominant ways that affect is thought and mobilised in dominant liberal and neoliberal discourses.
As a powerful commentary on the political, economic and affective links between colonialism and slavery and contemporary practices of tourism in the Caribbean that has provoked intense emotional responses among its readers, A Small Place offers a pertinent site through which to explore how history, power and violence shape the meanings and effects of empathy. It illustrates how the affective afterlives of colonialism, slavery and racism shape contemporary subjectivities in ways that are not easy to penetrate, nor possible to undo, through the power of empathetic will or imagination alone. In doing so, Kincaid’s text also considers the role that alternative empathies can play in interrogating the idea of time as linear, progressive and universal.
The continuing dialogue with loss and its aftermath that alternative empathies can engender, I argue, allows for engaging with ‘the performative force of the past’ (Munoz, 2009) in ways that invite us to break from fixed patterns and positionings and enter into a ‘more demanding’, and potentially more ethical, relationship to the world and our being in it (Kincaid, 1988: 57). I thus explore how alternative empathies might open out to affective politics which do not view emotions instrumentally as sources of – or solutions to – complex social and political problems, but rather examine diverse and shifting feeling states for what they tell us about the affective workings of power in a transnational world.
Biography
Dr. Carolyn Pedwell is Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Newcastle University, UK. She is author of Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice: The Rhetorics of Comparison (Routledge, 2010). Her work has also been published in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Feminist Theory, Feminist Review and Body and Society. Carolyn is on the editorial board of Feminist Theory and has conducted research consultancy work for the International Labour Office (ILO), the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and One World Action. Her current research focuses on the transnational politics of emotion and affect.