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"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"--
List 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
About the author
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.
Report
"It not only contributes to a growing body of scholarship on affect theory and neoliberal governmentality, but also problematises the ways in which empathy is mobilised by Western corporations, governments and humanitarian organisations. Affective Relations is a thought-provoking read that will appeal to a broad range of scholars, including those interested in postcolonial or transnational feminism, critical race theory and/or political anthropology." (Robin Valenzuela, feminist review, Vol. 116 (1), July, 2017)
"Pedwell engages with the politics of empathy as a politics of emotion that is simultaneously material and discursive, relational and embodied, local and transnational. Due to its disciplinary breadth, Affective Relations has something to offer anyone studying emotion from a biological, cultural, and/or political perspective." (Nicole Laliberté, Emotion, Space and Society, Vol. 21, November, 2016)
"Pedwell's rich study examines the diverse ways in which empathy is mobilised - from political speeches that uphold neoliberalism, to postcolonial literatures that refuse certain forms of empathic connection. ... The framework of Affective Relations is strongly interdisciplinary, bringing literatures from feminism, postcolonialism, neuroscience, psychoanalysis and popular science into dialogue. ... This is an ambitious project that highlights how empathy materialises in different spheres, through different media, and through different types of encounter." (Amanda Rogers, societyandspace.org, April, 2015)
