A deceptively easy query animates Imperfect Solidarities (Floating Opera Press, 2024), a brief new guide by author and artwork critic Aruna D’Souza: ‘What would it mean if our politics were based not on our ability to empathize with people whose experiences are distant from our own, but on our willingness to care for others just by virtue of their being beings?’
By addressing this query, D’Souza, a daily contributor to the New York Occasions, the Wall Road Journal, and different publications, explores the intricate intersections of race, gender, and identification with exceptional depth and nuance. After rejecting the concept that political solidarity must be based mostly on our inward feeling of sympathy for others, she suggests we acknowledge a way more demanding responsibility, a common obligation to take care of others.
She argues that empathy, whereas it could provoke a response, too typically stays a private response that fails to translate into political dedication or concrete actions. She calls this the ‘trap of empathy’ – a dynamic that subtly shifts the burden of duty from society to the victims themselves. Within the West, D’Souza argues, spectators of atrocities count on victims to carry out their trauma to lift consciousness, principally forcing them to make a spectacle of their ache in order that others may perceive and even really feel. As a substitute of receiving the quick solidarity they want, they need to beg for sympathy.
The writer challenges the readers to rethink their roles as a spectator of injustice and urges them to embrace a type of selfless solidarity that’s respectful of the ache of the victims.
The guide begins with media protection of the horrors produced by the continued Israeli assault in Gaza. In following chapters, she analyses Amitav Ghosh’s novel Sea of Poppies (2008), which tracks the lives, language, and perils of confusion of a motley crew of princes, pirates, peasants, and sailors, every along with his or her personal patois, or idiosyncratic type of talking, crammed collectively on an American schooner within the period main as much as the Opium Wars between China and the UK. The novel implies that solidarity is a transcendental precept that applies to each human being, even in conditions the place they barely perceive one another.
One other chapter highlights Candice Breitz’s 2016 set up Love Story, which was constructed on video interviews with six refugees in search of asylum from harmful conditions in Syria, Angola, Congo, India, Venezuela, and Somalia. A primary room of the set up shows the well-known actors Alec Baldwin and Julianne Moore recounting a few of what these refugees needed to say; the second room exhibits footage of the six asylum seekers telling their tales in their very own phrases. The stark distinction invitations us to replicate on what Teju Cole has referred to as the ‘white saviour industrial complex’.
This phenomenon highlights how, even when pushed by an ethical mission, white people can unknowingly profit from the very buildings of oppression they declare to withstand. This subjective, typically superficial empathy fails to seize the true complexity of human experiences. ‘Hollywood can never fully represent that complexity’, D’Souza argues—the identical Hollywood the place the manipulation of empathy regularly interprets into field workplace success. Whereas D’Souza’s critique is sharp, it’s essential to demand a better sense of ethical duty from the movie business, which, given its international affect, has a profound affect on international audiences, and particularly impacts attitudes in the direction of those that are regularly misrepresented.
D’Souza’s evaluation invitations us to query how empathy and the will for solidarity, whereas typically serving as a unifying drive, can generally be restricted to constructing superficial coalitions—the so-called ‘big tent mentality’. This method promotes the thought of a broad coalition whereas sustaining the very energy dynamics it superficially claims to problem.
Candice Breitz’s ‘Legends’, a part of PS1 set up at CAC, New Orleans. Picture by Stacie Brew through Flickr
In a last chapter, D’Souza explores the ‘productive value of difference, the power of speaking from a position of isolation’, via the reference to the exhibition Dialectics of Isolation (1980), curated by Ana Mendieta, Kazuko Miyamoto, and Zarina Hashmi. Subtitled ‘An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States’, the present featured ladies of color difficult art-world norms by isolating themselves from the mainstream buildings that may acceptable and neutralize their tales.
That is the sort of resistance that the writer goals for in her personal narrative, a story that doesn’t fake to be univocal; as an alternative, she promotes a stress with a dominant system that stifles the complexity of non-public experiences in favour of a basic and bland empathy.
Participating with Édouard Glissant’s idea of the ‘right to opacity’, Arouna D’Souza’s solidarity is reframed to respect people’ rights to take care of their complexity and thriller. This proper isn’t merely theoretical however important for constructing genuine alliances in a world marked by inequality and battle.
Whereas D’Souza’s proposal to position care on the centre of solidarity is provocative and affords thought-provoking insights, it should be counterbalanced by emotional consciousness. A politics of care that ignores the significance of empathy dangers changing into sterile, unable to foster genuine connections. D’Souza prompts us to think about the notion of ‘care before empathy’, by which our sense of responsibility is predicated on a dedication to take care of individuals as human beings.
The true problem lies in integrating care with empathy, making a type of solidarity that not solely respects variations but additionally deeply connects with the experiences of others. Solely by putting this stability can we aspire to construct a really equitable future.
This text was first revealed by Public Seminar on 4 March 2025.
