Affective Relations The Transnational Politics of Empathy

by Pedwell, Carolyn

• ISBN13: 9781137275257
• ISBN10: 1137275251
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-09-10
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy explores the power dynamics underlying the contemporary affective injunction to 'be empathetic', and their complex social and geopolitical implications. Through analysis of a range of popular and scholarly sites and texts – including Obama's speeches and memoirs, best-selling business books, international development literatures, popular science tracts, postcolonial literature and feminist, anti-racist and queer theory – this book investigates the possibilities, risks and contradictions of figuring empathy as an affective tool for engendering transnational social justice. Opening up new ways of thinking and feeling empathetic politics beyond universalist calls to 'put oneself in the others' shoes', it examines empathy's dynamic links to processes of location, translation, imagination and attunement. Affective Relations is interested in how empathy might be translated differently - how dominant liberal, neoliberal and neocolonial visions and practices of empathy can be reinterpreted in the context of transnationality to activate alternative affective connections, solidarities and potentialities.

Author Biography

Carolyn Pedwell is Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Newcastle University, UK. She is author of Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice: The Rhetorics of Comparison and co-editor of 'Affecting Feminism: Questions of Feeling in Feminist Theory', a special issue of Feminist Theory.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Empathy, Emotional Politics and Transnationality

1. Economies of Empathy: Obama, Neoliberalism and Social Justice

2. Affective (Self-) Transformations: Empathy, Social Theory and International Development

3. Affect at the Margins: Alternative Empathies in A Small Place

4. Affective Translation: Empathy and The Memory of Love

5. Circuits of Feeling in The Age of Empathy

Conclusions: Empathy and its Afterlives