DE-COLONISING EMPATHY: THINKING AFFECT TRANSNATIONALLY

Abstract

Opening up modes of political thinking and feeling take us beyond Euro-American calls to ‘put oneself in the other’s shoes’, this article explores how empathy is generated within, circulated through, and productive of transnational power relations. It starts by mapping some political genealogies of empathy, while considering what it might mean to ‘decolonise’ emotion. I then begin to flesh out my own critical approach by examining the ambivalent relationship between empathy and transnational capitalism, considering how feminist and antiracist discourses of care, empathy and social justice are susceptible to various forms of neoliberal appropriation. I move on to focus on the related workings of empathy in the affective aftermaths of European slavery and colonialism, asking how empathy expressed at the margins of normative postcolonial imaginaries might disrupt or refigure universalist emotional politics. Extending these critical concerns, the final section examines what I call ‘affective translation’, exploring what might be gained in moving away from dominant ideas of empathy premised on knowledge, accuracy and prediction towards a mode of affective translation involving attunement, negotiation and invention – across cultural and geopolitical borders and boundaries. Throughout, I am interested in how empathy might be translated differently– how liberal, neoliberal and neo-colonial visions and practices of empathy can be reinterpreted in the context of transnationality to activate alternative affective meanings, practices and potentialities.