Review: Mutilated empathy in spite of itself in Migrant Aesthetics: Contemporary Fiction, Global Migration, and the Limits of Empathy by Glenda Carpio (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023, 285pp.) [This review updated to correct typos and grammatical infelicities on Dec 10, 2023.]
Glenda R. Carpio is well-known for her work Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery (Oxford 2008). This work succeeds in a high-wire balancing act in transforming into humor that liberates, humanizes, and transfigures as only the art form of jokes can do racial stereotypes meant to devalue .
There is almost nothing that can be said about making jokes about race that cannot be distorted or misunderstood. The entire field of humor is fraught, and the more edgy and confrontational the joke or skit, the funnier it is—until it isn’t. Someone gets their feelings hurt and the potential laughter mutates into rage. Therefore, I am not going to tell a joke. I am going to make a generalization, which is definitely not as much fun. Acknowledging that reasonable people may disagree, I note the close relationship between humor/jokes and empathy.
For purposes of this review, the folk definition of empathy will suffice—take a walk in the Other’s shoes after first taking off one’s own to guard against the misfiring of empathy as projection. In empathy one navigates the firm boundary between self and Other with dignity, respect, recognition, and acknowledgement, in creating a community of self and Other. A rigorous and critical empathy maintains firm boundaries between self and Other, guarding against merger, emotional contagion, projection, and other common ways that empathic relating can misfire or go astray. Good fences make good neighbors, as the poet said, but there is a gate in the fence, and over the gate is inscribed the word “empathy.” In contrast with empathy, in joking one crosses the boundary between self and Other with aggression, insulting remarks, sexual suggestions or other violations of community standards—but it is all okay—why?—because it is a joke! Pause for laughter. One jumps over the wall—takes a prat fall backwards over the boundary between self and Other, and if the joke works, then the speech act of the joke creates a community in the shared laughter. (On the joke as a speech act that creates community see Cohen 1999; one may say the same thing, it creates community, about storytelling as the speech act corresponding to empathic receptivity Agosta 2010; also of note Wisse 2013.)
The connection of empathy with Carpio’s next work is evident in the title: Migrant Aesthetics: Contemporary Fiction, Global Migration, and the Limits of Empathy (Columbia UP 2023, 285 pp.). Now it is a bold statement of the obvious that empathy has its limits. A naïve merger with victimhood results in pity and sentimentality rather than taking a stand for social justice and positive politics in a productive sense. Nothing wrong as such with having a good cry, but that is already arguably a breakdown of would-be empathy. On the other hand, if one’s eyes get a bit moist that is another matter. Empathy is so fundamental an aspect of one’s being human, that lack of empathy can be seen as being inhuman (e.g., Keen 2008: 6; Blankenship 2019: 38).
The short review of Migrant Aesthetics is that it sets up an either/or choice between ending empire (e.g., colonialism, imperialism, racism, and so on) and expanding a rigorous and critical empathy. The book then mutilates empathy by confusing it with projection, emotional contagion, conformity, and other forms of miscommunication. Not surprisingly, the result is some 285 pages of penetrating analysis in which the reader does not get a single example of the practice of empathy resulting in a successful empathic relatedness in literary fiction. The attempt by Migrant Aesthetics to force a choice between expanding empathy and ending (or limiting) empire must be refused. Both results are needed. More on that shortly.
Meanwhile, the longer review: the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy knows that it can be wrong and can break down, misfire or go astray, flat out fail, as projection, emotional contagion, conformity, or communications getting lost in translation. It is precisely in engaging with and overcoming these obstacles and resistances to empathy that empathic relatedness and community are brought forth. Like with most powerful methods, skills, or interventions, practice makes the master. As a successful and popular teacher, Carpio knows the value of empathy, nor is mention of the word itself required. The good news is that empathy works whether one names it or not, whether one believes in it or not.
As noted, the issue is that in 285 pages of penetrating, incisive analysis of migrant aesthetics (the category, not the title), there is not a single example of what an effective empathy would look like. The reader is not given a single example of a healthy empathic relatedness that works, so that one could identify it if one happened to encounter it. This bears repeating: in some 285 pages of summary and analysis of the literary fictions of Dinaw Mengestu, Teju Cole, Aleksandar Hemon, Valeria Luiselli, Julie Otsuka, Junot Diaz, and some nonfiction of others, Migrant Aesthetics does not cite a single example of empathy that works right or functions as designed. Granted that empathy does not always succeed, the reader does not learn what a healthy, rigorous and critical empathy might look like if, rare as it may be (as empathy skeptics assert), if one happened to encounter empathy. None. Not one single example of what empathy looks like when it succeeds in producing empathic relatedness. This must give the reader pause. We take a step back—but not too far back.
If truth is the first casualty of war—try substituting one of Carpio’s key words “empire” for “war”—then empathy is a close second. In an astute and penetrating analysis, consistently engaging and controversial, Migrant Aesthetics periodically pauses to “foreclose empathy” or the possibility of an empathic response. The steady drumbeat of foreclosing, undercutting, invalidating, or dismissing empathy occurs like a recurring rhythm that, to this reader, suggested an editorial decision or personal commitment or both.
Now I might be wrong but I understand “foreclose” as used in Migrant Aesthetics, not in the Lacanian/Hegelian sense of “aufgehoben,” cancel and preserve, but what one does when one can’t pay the mortgage—hand over the property, abandoning it in lieu of payment. You wouldn’t want to be aufgehoben would you? In any case, the term is used in a devaluing way—like it is a bad thing to empathize at the point of foreclosure.
Many things exist about which to be aggrieved in a world inheriting the violent outcomes (still ongoing) of colonialism, imperialism, prejudice, summarized as “empire,” but Migrant Aesthetics’ main grievance is reserved for empathy. I hasten to add that I am against pain and suffering of all kinds including that caused by empire, imperialism, colonialism, and prejudice. I do not carry water for the pathologies of capitalism and call out the distortions of empathy under capitalism.For example, the boss is “empathic” towards the wage slaves in their cubicles—in order to expand productivity. Give the works some empathy in order to improve their mood. Happy workers work harder and are more productive. The salesman takes a walk in the shoes of the customer—in order to sell him or her another pair! Under empire one gets mutilated empathy.
Granted, Michael Jordan reportedly said that even Republicans (people in the political party) buy athletic sneakers (see also Adams 2016), implying he was happy to sell them while disagreeing politically.
That empathy can be distorted, misused, and pathologized—mutilated—no more invalidates empathy than that Roman soldiers drove spikes into the limbs of the people they were crucifying invalidates carpentry. Admittedly an extreme example, but it does make the point that carpentry is a wholesome and useful practice – and so is empathizing.
In Migrant Aesthetics, the problems of empire are so complex, messy, intractable, one has to blame something—let’s blame empathy—for example, instead of pointing to human aggression as a variable hidden in plain view. Empathy did not and does not succeed in solving these all problems, though empathy is a proven method of deescalating violence in situations of conflict. However, note well, there is a readiness assessment for empathy—the parties must be willing to try.
The critique of empire, colonialism, prejudice, and so on, is indispensably committed to empathy for another reason that does not seem to occur to Migrant Aesthetics. Another definition of “empire” is the systematic denial of empathy. Whenever a great injustice is about to be perpetrated, the first step is to deny, suspend, cancel, the empathy of the proposed devalued Other, the soon-to-be-victim. Thus, the comparison of about-to-be-victims to insects, with whom we humans notoriously have trouble empathizing; and thus, the required wearing of the yellow star prior to deportation; and parallel methods of alienation. The perpetrators apply mutilated empathy to the intended victims. No good comes of it.
Migrant Aesthetics does not “get it” regarding empathy, and, strangely enough, risks incurring the aesthetic reeducation that gives comfort to certain forms of fascist thinking that begin by driving out critical thinking, the ability to take the point of view of one’s opponent, and, above all, a rigorous and critical empathy. We shall recur frequently to the empathic blind spots of the mutilated empathy of migrant aesthetics (the category, not merely the book) in this review. I hasten to add, this review is long, and engaging with this book has been vexing, albeit an empathic labor of love, but the review is still a lot shorter than the book, thereby sparing you, dear reader, who will not need further to engage after this thorough discussion.
Meanwhile, at the risk of being cynical, consistency is over-rated: Migrant Aesthetics makes significant use of standard empathy, though unacknowledged. The simplest narrative would be unintelligible and would read like the railroad schedule unless one brings empathy to the narrative. One can engage in producing “impassable” distances “between the reader and the text” (p. 39) and a “forceful rejection of readerly empathy” (p. 148), but, having done so, one should not be surprised that the narrative is drained of vitality, strength, energy, and aliveness. And sometimes that is the point as in Ronald Barthes (1953) “writing degree zero,” a “colorless writing, freed from all bondage to a pre-ordained state of language.” Less is more. (For example, see the rediscovery of “writing degree zero” without acknowledging the phrase (Carpio: 11).)
In addition, though reasonable people may disagree, Barthes asserts that in writing degree zero the author is collective and group-oriented. The distinction “choral” as used in Migrant Aesthetics had not been invented yet in Barth as such, but the idea is the various authors “pass around” the manifesto, literary artwork, or press release on which they are working. The sun sets on the individual author’s voice, who, even if she is not dead, joins the FBI witness protection program and goes underground (Barthes 1968).
The assertion is that empathy is indispensable even when employing distancing methods of alienation (think of Bertolt Brecht’s Epic Theatre). Perspective taking, taking a walk in the Other’s shoes after first taking off one’s own (the folk definition of empathy), is a necessary condition for making sense out of a story as the occurrence of human-relevant events. Indeed a minimalist approach often lets the empathy emerge more forcefully, for example, in Virginia Woolf,’s Nathalie Sarraute’s, or Albert Camus’ writings. Of Migrant Aesthetics’ favorite authors, Teju Cole, Julie Otsuka and Valeria Luiselli are towards the top of the list in the “less is more” in writing category.
A possible way forward (not called out by Migrant Aesthetics), in which, empathy and literary fiction intersect productively, in spite of the obstacles of empire, is invoking the speech act of conversational implicative. Conversational implicature brings forth the didactic alienation effect of Brecht’s epic theatre, the minimalist style of “writing degree zero,” and the indirection expression of the unspoken. “Conversational implicature” is an indirect speech act that suggests an idea or thought, even though the thought is not literally expressed. Conversational implicature creates distance between the reader and the text, which is more like a tenuous suspension bridge of rope over the river rapids in the jungle than a highway on the interstate. Conversation implicature lets the empathy in—and out—to be expressed without the psychological mechanisms of emotional contagion, projection, conformity, and so on, which result in mutilated empathy. Such implicature expands the power and provocation of empathy precisely by not saying something explicitly but hinting at what happened. This distinction (conversational implicature) seems to live in the empathic blind spot of migrant aesthetics. The information is incomplete, the context unclarified, and the reader is challenged to feel her/his way forward using the available micro-expressions, clues, and hints. Instead of saying “she was raped and the house was haunted by a ghost,” one must gather the implications. In an example, not in Carpio, from Toni Morrison’s Beloved, one reads:
Not only did she have to live out her years in a house palsied by the baby’s fury at having its throat cut, but those ten minutes she spent pressed up against dawn-colored stone studded with star chips, her knees wide open as the grave, were longer than life, more alive, more pulsating than the baby blood that soaked her fingers like oil (Morrison 1987: 5–6).
The reader does a double-take. What just happened? Then the casual conversation resumes about getting a place to live, which one had been having when this utterance erupted, as the reader tries to integrate what just happened into a semi-coherent narrative. Yet why should a narrative of incomprehensibly inhumane events make more sense than the events themselves? When the event are inhumane perhaps the empathic receptivity consists precisely in being with their inhumanity without doing something “human” like trying to make sense of them— better to weep or rend one’s garments. No good reason—except that humans inevitably try to make sense of the incomprehensible. “Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief” (1987: 6). One of the effects and empathy lessons is to get the reader to think about the network of implications in which are expressed the puzzles and provocations of what really matters at fundamental level. (For more on conversational implicature see Levinson 1983: 9–165.)
For example, at the end of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage, all her children are dead—but she continues to follow the soldiers, selling them gun powder and provisions, more dedicated to her commercial (read: “capitalist”) enterprises than to her children. No catharsis of pity and fear here, and the viewer’s empathy is not mutilated by emotional upset, projection, conformity, and so on. The viewer’s empathy is left with pent up emotional upset that may usefully be directed into changing the social and economic conditions that allow such a possibility. And of course that is the point. However, even in this case the distancing does not work without a “top down,” cognitive empathy that gets one to think.
There is nothing wrong as such with Migrant Aesthetics. But there is something missing. The reader (audience) does not find out what a healthy relationship looks like. As for Toni Morrison, she discovers the hope of wholeness and integrity elsewhere in the text, pointing to an example of one as the shadows of the characters are holding hands, indicating the possibility of family (Morrison 1987: 67).
Migrant aesthetics is littered with limbs and fragments of human beings—both the bones of dead refugees in the desert and emotional trauma—not a whole person in sight anyway. The author may argue back: “You have now got the point—thus, the consequences of empire!” Point taken, yet—the issue is that one is not on the slippery slope to the aestheticization (and anesthetization) of violence, trauma porn, and moral trauma, one is at the bottom of it. The empathy is as mutilated by projection, emotional contagion, conformity, and misunderstanding, as the desperate lives of the migrants wandering in the wilderness of empire. Heavens knows, empathy has its limitations, but not one single example of a healthy, robust, effective application of empathy in a relationship that works?
As an exercise, the reader is invited to find an example of an empathic relationship in the writings of Dinaw Mengestu, Teju Cole, Junot Diaz, exemplified in Migrant Aesthetics. Once again, there is nothing wrong as such with the roll call of traumatic outrages perpetrated by bad actors and the survivors of personal breakdowns and political disasters—yet one must be a tad masochistic to engage with the outcomes of so much toxicity, violence, and aggressive masculinity—so much empire. Tragedy—the art form, not merely today’s headlines—is rich in examples of survivors who become perpetrators (and vice versa (e.g., 9, 19, 30, 43, 167)) but, without empathy, the result is just catastrophe, wreck, and ruin.
The choice between expanding empathy and ending empire is a false choice. It must be declined. Both are worthy objectives. In two cases, the migrant authors with whom Migrant Aesthetics is engaging get close to a successful application of empathy, but then fall short. The short coming (I assert) is not in Edwidge Danticat or in Karla Carnejo Villavicencio, but in Migrant Aesthetics’ misreadings of these authors’ contributions to a rigorous and critical empathy, misreadings that seems designed uncharitably to make sure that empathy is not credited with making a difference.
First, in the case of Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying (which, however, is a memoir not fiction), the author comes close to endorsing the use of Danticat’s work empathically to train U.S. custom officers and immigration workers, directly quoting Danticat: “[…] [F]or if ‘they can only remember that they are dealing with human beings at possibly the worst moments of their lives and not mere numbers or so-called ‘aliens,’ then they would do a better job” (Carpio 2023: 218). But then Migrant Aesthetics pulls back and forcloses the empathy as providing a handbook for welcoming migrants instead of part of systemic unempathic empire, for example, that aligns the U.S. imperialism of the invasion of Haiti with the invasion of Iraq. What I can’t figure out is why one has to choose between welcoming those migrants, whether using an empathic “handbook” or not, and further debunking the by-now well-known and appalling mistakes of the so-called war on terrorism? Doesn’t the world need both expanded empathy and political action against the abuses of the war on terrorism and imperialism?
Second, Carpio credits Karla Cornejo Villavicencio with being motivated by the belief that literature can create productive empathy, or at least compassion (Carpio: 234), quoting Karla:
Art allows us to feel for the pain of others who have or will experience pain we cannot imagine or cannot ever happen to us. Even if we cannot feel it, or imagine it, that’s just human limitation. A failure of imagination can be compensated by the construction of a sturdy enough bridge of artistic articulation of that pain, and if it’s honest enough, we may not feel it—though in some cases we may—but we will feel for our fellow humans, and that is the job of the artist (Carpio: 234)
However, then Migrant Aesthetics undercuts this quote by detecting “ambivalence” in Villavicencio. Heavens to Murgatroyd! If Villavicencio were not ambivalent about vicariously feeling the pain of Others, one would have to dismiss her as being unempathic. And Migrant Aesthetics actually does something like that as it again tries to force a choice where none is warranted between struggling human beings, the unnamed migrants over whose graves no one has prayed, and contingent forces (including empire, etc.) that force survivors to migrate and become refugees. Migrant Aesthetics devalues Villavicencio’s empathy for struggling humanity—she almost gets there—but then she does not—and ends on a note of haunting and shame. This steady drum beat of the devaluing of empathy must give the reader pause. There’s another agenda here with the constant rhythm of dozens of mentions of various forms of empathy, and not a positive productive application of empathy in sight. What’s going on here?
Caprio asserts: “…[W]hat has been my centra argument in this work: that the history of empire is key in understanding the roots of migration at a scale appropriate to its global dimensions (Carpio: 228).” That to be forced from one’s home and become a refugee of the road is surely a source of enormous pain and suffering. Here the connection is direct—cause (routed from one’s home by aggression, starvation, etc.) and effect (pain, suffering). At the risk of over-simplification, yet a compelling one, white Europeans with cannons and machine guns go to Africa and Asia and exploit the natural resources and enslave or dominate the locals. A small subset of the locals is coopted—analogous to the concentration camp capos, both perpetrators and survivors (until they are not) being chosen from the prisoners—to make the job of the ruling class easier. Even the surviving prisoners then become perpetrators as one starving prisoner “steals” bread or water from another or lies to save his own skin, thereby endangering another. And some of those locals migrant back to headquarters, whether Boston, London, Paris, Amsterdam, or New York.
Now if anyone seriously believes that empathy is going to cut the knot created by empire, colonialism, imperialism, and so, then—how shall I put it delicately?—empathy is being “over sold.” This is usually the first step in setting up empathy as a “strawman” to be blamed for not fixing the many challenges facing civilized human beings committed to building a community that works for all persons.
There are at least two hidden variables behind the problematic causal analysis of empire that would help connect the dots between empire and empathy-based solutions: Human aggression and human hunger (hunger for many things, but here for food). These human beings are an aggressive species—and biologically omnivores. People can be kind and compassionate and empathic, but they also can behave aggressively and violently. Even if committed vegetarians, people also need to eat quite regularly, if not exactly three times a day.
To say, as Migrant Aesthetics does, that the arrival of the white European conquistador and their horses in the new world in 1492 was a catastrophe for the original inhabitants gets the measure of the event about right. In a way, the displacement of the Cherokee Nation from Georgia to Oklahoma is a kind of migration; but not really. It is a death march with strong aspects of genocide.
By all means denounce empire, but a more useful approach consistent with such righteous indignation might be to elaborate an analysis of human aggression, territoriality, lack of education, lack of critical thinking, the disturbing tendency of many human beings fanatically to follow authoritarian figures off a cliff (e.g., Hoffer 1951). In that context, empathy is a proven way of deescalating violence and aggression.
Unfortunately, once a “policeman” is kneeling on your neck or someone throws a bomb, it is too late for empathy. The perpetrator fails the readiness assessment for empathy and it is necessary to invoke self-defense. And remember the best defense is a good offense—provided that it is proportionate to the incoming violence (which is notoriously hard to determine). Self-defense, setting limits, establishing boundaries are what is needed. There is a readiness assessment for empathy, and it requires that one be relatively safe and secure in one’s own person. Above all, the readiness requires a willingness to inquire into one’s own blindspots and preconscious biases. Furthermore, Empathy 101 teaches that empathy does not work an active battlefield, if one is starving to death, or hanging upside down in a torture chamber. Never underestimate the power of empathy—never—but empathy in such extreme situations ends up looking like what the FBI Hostage Negotiating team uses to open communication with the hostage takers, or looking like “Red Team, Red Team!”—think like the opponent in a war game (e.g., Zenko 2015). As it stands, Migrant Aesthetics misunderstands empathy, mutilates it, and then blames empathy because empathy can be misapplied by migrant authors, some of the male members of which are both perpetrators and survivors, for calling attention to their plight and that of the devalued Other within us all.
The dialectic of unanticipated consequences marches on. Streets paved with gold are noticeably absent from the “classic” traditional migrant fictions of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918) and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), though one recurring, invariable constant among immigrants, refugees, and migrants is that they all express motivation to make a better life for their children. The Lithuanian migrants in The Jungle claw their way to a conclusion in which they are learning to speak socialist truth to power, having adopted a progressive socialist program that is today considered unradical because it is the law of the land. Sinclair joked: “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach” as citizens insisted on the Meat Inspection Act the Pure Food and Drug act. The folks in My Ántonia are trying to grow crops in Nebraska, which in the first map of North American was designed as “the great American desert.” In Ole Edvart Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth (1927), set in South Dakota, also part of the Great American Desert, no mention is made of the original inhabitants, who have already been buried at Wounded Knee, and the main action is the battle against a ferocious climate: snow storms, locusts who ravage the crops, hunger, isolation, cultural alienation of the children, and the stereotypical mad scene of the heroine prior to a Christian-based recovery and rebirth in spirituality. Though the sustainability of the Ogalala Aquifer continues to be a concern, the migrants succeed in getting the desert to bloom.
The other hidden variable is that these humans are a hungry species. At the risk of over-simplification, long since incurred, the development of Cyrus McCormick’s combine-wheat-reaper, and the follow-on agribusiness technology, allow some 2% of the population to grow enough food to feed the entire planet; and this in spite of the fact that human choices made under aggression continue to use food as a weapon of starvation. Prior to the Green Revolution, the other 98% of the population had to work twelve to sixteen hours a day to grow enough food to avoid slow death by starvation. As noted, the migrant classics, admittedly shot through with empire, of Willa Cather and Ole Edvart Rolvaag, confront hunger as an ever-present specter, pending a successful harvest. Meanwhile, apparently large dairy herds really do contribute to greenhouse gases.
It is hard not to be a tad cynical: quit one’s day job as a Mandarin professor pronouncing ex cathedra or a highly compensated empathy consultant and spend twelve hours a day growing one’s own food. “Get back to the land and set your soul free—we are star dust, we are billion-year-old carbon”? The melting of the polar ice cap at the north pole and the opening of the long-sought “northwest passage” is evidence of global warming that, absent delusional thinking, is hard-to-dispute. Nor is it a contradiction that both human-made greenhouses gases the earth’s procession of the equinox work together multiplicatively toward the trend of global warming. On background, the procession of the equinoxes is the tilt of the planet earth that causes an arrow pointing upward from the north pole towards the North Star to spin around the North Star rather than directly at it in a 25K year cycle, resulting in a regular, measurable tilt toward and away from the sun that arguably is enough to contribute significantly to global cycles of warming and cooling. Splitting—either human’s hunger for meat versus the continency of a wobbly planet—offers a false choice and must be declined.
The grievance against empathy begins: Migrant Aesthetics writes (p. 4): “More broadly, the genre of immigrant literature depends on a model of reading founded on empathy—a model that my book takes to task. Literature promotes empathy, we are told, but empathy can easily slip into a projection of readers’ feelings and even into outright condescension.” As a reviewer, I am holding my head in my hands and rocking back-and-forth quasi-catatonically. I am in disbelief at the lack of common sense, lack of critical thinking, and absence of argumentative charity in confusing empathy and projection. Projection is a breakdown of empathy. Projection is a misfiring and/or going off the rails of empathy. Projection is a “getting lost in translation” of empathy. Now attribute these to empathy and dismiss empathy. Hmmm.
As regards “a model of reading founded on empathy,” please stop right there. Reading the story would not work—would not make any sense—would, strictly speaking, be unintelligible without empathy. Without empathy, the actions and contingencies, the struggles and high spirits, setbacks and successes, that are represented in the story would be strange sounds and gestures appearing to an anthropologist on Mars or on her first day in an alien culture, prior to marshalling her empathic skills. Never underestimate the power of storytelling, but absent empathy, it does not get traction. Reading is founded on empathy.
If the reader did not bring the capacity for empathy to the reading of the text, the text itself would not make sense. Reading the simplest narrative about a snowman melting in the spring thaw, much less Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina’s anguish at being patriarchally denied access to her son, would be unintelligible. Without the vicarious experience of empathic receptivity, the reading of the most dramatic fiction will be indistinguishable from reading the railroad schedule when the rail workers were on strike. Meaningless. Unintelligible. The water streaming from the abandoned child’s face would not be tears; the clenched fist would not be anger but an excess of adrenaline; the trembling would not be fear but Parkinson’s disorder. The migrant bones in the desert over which no one prayed would be calcified carbon, not an anguished cry for help and human response. Without empathy, one would perhaps be able to provide an accurate description, whether as fact or fiction is irrelevant here, of the Other’s behavior from a third person perspective, but the behavior would lack vitality, energy, strength, aliveness, and relatedness to the things that matter to human beings. One would truly be like Descartes looking out the window at people on the street below, wondering if the entities that appear to be people are really rather robot-like automata. Descartes was practicing an exercise in radical doubt, whereas the reader that lacked the capacity for empathy would be practicing an exercise in radical draining of meaning from the text in every sense from pragmatics to semantics—encountering empty words describing empty behavior, as noted, like reading a train schedule during the railway strike, instead of reading an engaging narrative such as Anna’s emotional, moral, cognitive. spiritual struggles to attain self-knowledge and personal fulfillment.
However, Migrant Aesthetic responds: You have now got the point. Drive out empathy to let justice and a small set of related responses come forth. It doesn’t work. Migrant Aesthetics “forecloses” (rejects) empathy, then immediately lets it back in, because empathy is indispensable.
Carpio (p. 8): “[…] [T]he writers I examine reject empathy as the main mode of rationality, opting instead for what Hannah Arendt called “representative thinking” that is, they urge reader to think, as themselves, from the position of another person and thus to call into question their own preconceptions and actions” [italics added]. Thus, Migrant Aesthetics rejects empathy while calling out and requiring including “the position of another person,” which is precisely the folk definition of empathy.
Arendt’s reference here is of course to a single line in Kant’s Third Critique (1791/93 (AA 158)) about “enlarged thinking” [erweiterten…Denkungart] that is, to think from the perspective of the Other. Sounds like the folk definition of empathy to me. This cipher of “enlarged thinking”, which remains unintegrated in Kant, became the inspiration for Arendt’s incomplete third volume of the life of the mind on political judgment. Once again, it is the folk definition of empathy.
The fan out is challenging at this point. This single quote from Arendt plays such a significant role in Migrant Aesthetics that there is no avoiding a dive into Arendt scholarship. By invoking the formidable name and work of Hannah Arendt, who was herself a migrant refugee (note well!), a Jewish person fleeing from the Nazis, a whole new thread is started.
Arendt rarely uses the word “empathy,” though “animal pity” gets called out in the context of Himmler’s fake empathy (Arendt 1971: 105–106; Agosta 2010: 73). Arendt is not thought of as an advocate for empathy, though, in its own Kantian way, her work is rich in empathic understanding. In one of her few uses of the word “empathy” itself, the otherwise astute Arendt claims that “empathy” requires becoming the Other in a kind of merger, which, of course, is the breakdown of empathy into emotional contagion. Other than this terminological slip up, Arendt’s analysis is an incisive application of empathy to politics in “Truth and Politics” in Between Past and Future (1968: 9):
I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them. This process of representation does not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand somewhere else, and hence look upon the world from a different perspective; this is a question neither of empathy, as though I tried to be or to feel like somebody else, nor of counting noses and joining a majority but of being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not. The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusions… The very process of opinion formation is determined by those in whose places somebody thinks and uses his own mind, and the only condition for this exertion of the imagination is disinterestedness, the liberation from one’s own private interests (Arendt 1968: 9; italics added).
The word “empathy” is in principle dispensable here, and Arendt’s lovely phrase “one trains one’s imagination to go visiting [the Other]” is an exact description of empathic understanding, though not empathic receptivity of the Other’s feelings/emotions. One does not blindly adopt the Other’s point of view—one takes off one’s own shoes before trying on the Other’s. Even in a thoughtless moment, more thinking occurs in Arendt’s casual, throw-away use of a word, than in most people’s entire dictionaries. If necessary, Arendt may be read against herself, for the simple introduction of the distinction “vicarious experience” of an Other’s experience is sufficient to contain all the puzzling cases about being or becoming someone else. As a good Kantian, Arendt would align in a universalizing moment with Kant’s sensus communus [“common sense” as an instrument of judgment]. Kant’s “enlarged thinking,” taking the points of view of many Others, is what enables people to judge by means of feelings as well as concepts. This is not loss of one’s self in projection and merger, but rather a thoughtful shifting of perspective and appreciation of what shows up as one does so. It is a false splitting to force a choice between feeling and thinking—both are required to have a complete experience of the Other.
Regarding Arendt’s use of the word “empathy” [Einfühlung] itself, it is likely she encountered it in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927: H125 [pagination of the German Niemeyer edition]), which she studied carefully. There Heidegger undercuts Max Scheler’s use of the term in criticizing Theodor LIpps, who uses of the term in his (Lipps’) Aesthetics (1903; see also Lipps 1909), in which Lipps defines empathy [Einfühlung] as a kind of aesthetic projection of the subject’s feelings onto art and nature (and the Other). The original definition of “empathy” in Lipps’ aesthetics is hard to distinguish from projective empathy. (The matter is a tangle, which I disentangle in Agosta (2014).) The examples of an angry storm at sea or the melancholy weeping willow trees or the smiling clouds and cheerful sunrise come to mind.
The controversy continues to fan out as Migrant Aesthetics marshals the authority of Namwali Serpall’s “The Banality of Empathy” (2019). Nice title. This is a reference to Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1971), about which it is hard to say just a little. I shall try. One of Arendt’s recurring themes is that evil is a consequence of thoughtlessness. She above on “enlarged thinking” and integrating many diverse points of view. According to Arendt, Eichmann was a simpleton, a “Hans Wurst” from the folktale, who did not think and just followed orders. The wanted-dead-or-alive poster for Thoughlessness has Eichmann’s photo on it. The result of thoughtlessness was catastrophe. Indeed. Of course, Eichmann had many “fellow travelers” in genocide.
If one empathizes thoughtlessly, the banality of empathy of Serpall’s title, then one is at risk of empathy misfiring as projection, emotional contagion, conformity, and so on. Just so. A rigorous and critical empathy is required to guard against these risks, and Arendt, no advocate for sloppy anything, much less sloppy empathy, is halfway, but not all-the-way, there with her invocation of Kant’s rigorous and critical method. The above-cited quotation from Arendt and my analysis of terms must count towards a clarification of the nuances of the matter of empathy.
Serpall’s article then raises the question about narrative art “If witnessing suffering firsthand doesn’t spark good deeds, why do we think art about suffering will?” Though this may have been intended as a rhetorical question, the answer requires an empirical, fact-based inquiry. Some witnessing of suffering does indeed spark good deeds. The standard Samaritan becomes the Good Samaritan when he stops to help the survivor of the robbery thereby creating neighborliness and community; whereas the Levite and Priest succumb to empathic distress and cross the road, thereby expanding indifference and alienation. These events get “narrativized” in the Parable of the same name, which, in turn, inspires some to good deeds, though others are left paralyzed by empathic distress.
As Suzanne Keen (2007) points out, some stories such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin have an outsized effect on positive politics, rallying people to the cause of the abolition of slavery; whereas other novels such as The Turner Diaries may arguably have given comfort to white supremacy and provided bomb-making instructions to domestic terrorists. The answer to Serpall’s (or the editor’s) question is direct: we think art will inspire good deeds because we find examples of art’s doing so, albeit with conditions and qualifications. The evidence: that is what happened. The more important but unaddressed issue is to distinguish how art can transfigure the pain and suffering of the migrant (and suffering humanity at large), overcoming trauma, or how such attempts risk devolving into what is sometimes called “trauma porn,” engaging the graphical description of trauma without the “disinterestedness of art,” resulting in a kind of indulgent “orgasm” of aggressive violent fantasies. (As a benchmark, and acknowledging that reasonable people may disagree, an example of trauma porn (other than snuff videos on the dark web) would be Mel Gibson’s film (2004), The Passion of the Christ.)
Arendt is sometimes accused, I believe unfairly, of being tin-eared in her statements about US race relations and desegregation, especially in Little Rock, AK in 1957. When the 13-year-old Arendt was subjected to antisemitic comments by her teacher at school in Königsberg, Germany,1919, her mother withdrew her under protocol and protest and home-schooled Hannah, before sending her off to Berlin for a secondary education. You have to get the picture here: the young Hannah reading the leather-bound Kantian First Critique in her late father’s vast library. Seemingly following the recommendation that Migrant Aesthetics (pp. 8, 13, 201) attributes to Arendt, she adopts a position, not a person, regarding US race relations (circa 1957!). “Positions not persons” is a fine slogan. It doesn’t work. Another false choice? The young black children in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 needed to get into the classroom to actually get books from the school library as some black families did not own a single book other than the bible (which, in a pinch, is an excellent choice, nevertheless…). That Arendt’s empathy misfires no more means that she lacks empathy or that empathy is invalid than that a driver who forgets to use her turn signal does not know how to drive (though she may get a citation!).
What is rarely noted by Arendt scholars is Arendt’s own strategic use of empathy in escaping from the Nazis. Having been arrested for Zionist “propaganda” activity by the Nazis, she builds an empathic rapport with the Gestapo prosecuting attorney, who is interviewing her in the same basement from which other Jewish people are deported to Buchenwald or Dachau. The result was not predictable. Arendt was released on her own recognizance, and, of course, she had immediately to flee across the border illegally. Now while we will never know all the nuances—in the interview (1964) Arednt makes it sound like part of her tactic to save her own life was that she bats her eyelashes at the young naïve Gestapo prosecutor, who has just been transferred from the criminal to the political division—more grim humor—but, don’t laugh, it worked. Never underestimate the power of empathy. (See Arendt’s interview with English subtitles “Hannah Arendt: Im Gespräch mit Günter Gaus” (1964).[1 Thus, never having used the word “empathy” positively even one time, the practice saves her life.
To compete the discussion of Arendt (1955/68: 153–206), she wrote a short intellectual biography of Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) in Men in Dark Times. Separately, Benjamin warned that the aestheticization of politics risks turning artistic expression into fascism. The theatrical (“artistic”) spectacle of a torch light parades at Nurnberg, Germany, (1933–1938) by masses of brown shirt Nazi storm troopers around a bonfire burning the canonical novels of western civilization is a mutilation of empathy into the emotional contagion of crowds as well as a mutilation of that civilization itself. Once again, it is hard to say just a little bit about this, nor is this review going to solve the problem of the relation between the aesthetic and the political. It is a disappointment that Arendt did not live long enough to complete more than a single sentence of her deep dive into the relation between Kant’s Critique of (Aesthetic) Judgment and politics; nor is it likely that such a project would have produced what Hegel produced when he undertook such a deep dive: The Philosophy of Right (1921), which read superficially gives the authority of The State a leading role in political life: “It is the way of God in the world, that there should be a state” according to Walter Kaufman’s translation.
Migrant aesthetics politicizes aesthetics with an anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, anti-empire-ist commitments, rhetoric (in the classical sense), and expressions, without necessarily making practical recommendations for political action. Migrant Aesthetics expels empathy from the garden of artistic achievement, because empathy does not provide a stable basis for political action. Never underestimate the relevance of Immanuel Kant, yet if one wants measurable results from political action, apply Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals (1971) or analysis based on Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer (1951), not Kant’s Third Critique. Hoffer calls out the mutilated logic of totalitarian thinking; and Alinsky knew quite a lot about building communities, and though he did not use the word “empathy,” empathy lives in building community.
Resuming the main line of the argument, Migrant Aesthetics continues the devaluation of empathy. It is choral. Migrant Aesthetics paraphrases the novelist, professor, and celebrity migrant [Viet Thanh] Nguyen (p. 31): “Nguyen argues that empathy, while being necessary for human connection, cannot be relied upon as the basis of political action because it is selective and unstable; it can easily morph into solipsism and escapism.” Wait a minute! Empathy “being necessary for human connection,” please stop right there!
Take away empathy, the requirement for human connection is cancelled and—solipsism and escapism are the result. How shall I put it delicately? By their own words, they shall be exposed; looks like a solid case of the emperor’s new clothes, to quote the late Sinéad O’Connor. Once again, I am sitting here holding my head in my hands, rocking back and forth semi-catatonically, amazed that the breakdown of connectedness such as solipsism and escapism should be made an essential part of empathy’s defining features. Take away human connection, which empathy brings forth, which is itself the defining aspect of empathy, and pathological forms of domination occur such as “the structural inequities of a settler colonial state.” Ouch! It is like invalidating carpentry because an apprentice carpenter hits his thumb with the hammer (we will leave that other example behind for now). It is a problem that empathy is sometimes selective (parochial) and unstable like the human beings who try to apply it. The solution is expanded empathy. Unstable indeed. So far, the only thing stable about Migrant Aesthetics’ argument is its devaluing of empathy.
Nor is this necessarily an accurate representation of Nguyen position, who (I suggest) sees himself as an educator not a political infighter (though one cold be both). Two wrongs do not make a right. The commitment to human rights is worth sustaining even in the face of the inhumanity of empire, which presents false choices between empathy and conformity. Human beings are a kind and empathic species, as noted, and they are also an aggressive and hungry one. Nguyen: “Art is one of the things that can keep our minds and hearts open, that can help us see beyond the hatred of war, that can make us understand that we cannot be divided into the human versus the inhuman because we are, all of us, human and inhuman at the same time” (quoted in Goldberg 2023). Nor is this to endorse the inhumane behavior of many humans. Once again, Nguyen knows one does not have to choose between ending empire and expanding empathy.
Migrant Aesthetics cites the eight definitions of empathy, or, more exactly, empathically-relevant phenomena, starting from C. Daniel Batson (2012). Migrant Aesthetics is also conversant with Susan Lanzoni’s (2018) magisterial account Empathy: A History, which includes many more definitions. Martha Nussbaum’s (and other’s) argument is cited that “the belief that reading fiction improves individuals’ empathic power” (Carpio: 11). However, on the latter position, see Suzanne Keen’s above-cited point about this requiring an empirical, fact-based inquiry. Those who bring an ounce of empathy to quality literature, often come away with a pound of empathy; but bad actors who, for example, bring white supremacy to their reading come away with further bad actions. If a slave owner had read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it is probable that he would have come away saying, as regards the beating death, “That slave had it comin!’ Was exactly what he deserved!” That reader missed the point. And on that grim note we turn to the survivor/perpetrators, who form a large part of the “data,” the literary narratives, in Migrant Aesthetics.
The first fictional witness is Dinaw Mengestu’s protagonist Isaac from All Our Names (2014). Fleeing from war in Ethiopia to Uganda, he goes from the frying pan to the fire. His mentor perpetrates mass murder. Isaac is forced to cover up the crimes by burying the victims in a mass grave. Isaac is coopted into delivering arms to young boys—child soldiers—who perpetrate their own outrages before perishing. Isaac survives, smuggling himself to the States in a small trunk in a scene reminiscent of the animation Aladdin with the Genie who has to spend 10,000 years in the bottle, but it is not nearly as funny. The entire story is told from two points of view, that of Isaac, who has survived the atrocities of the unnamed but Ida-Amin-like authoritarian monster; and that of the mild-mannered white social worker, Helen, assigned to Isaac to help with his recovery—Isaac, the poster child for empathy (as it were). The differences in their respective experiences are a powerful setup to challenge anyone’s empathy—but especially Helen’s and the reader’s.
The social worker, Helen, strives to map the scope and limits of her empathy, but her empathy is tin-eared, ineffective, and misfires. The client, Isaac, needs a lot of things that Helen can’t give him—he needs fluency in English, a good paying job, adaptation to the local community, respect for women in general, a relationship with a romantic partner who appreciates him as a possibility (and vice versa). The one thing Helen is most able to do—give Isaac a good listening—give him empathic receptivity—she fails at—badly. In a clumsy social psychology experiment, Helen tries to overcome the de facto segregation of her small town’s local diner by having dinner there with Isaac. This role playing results in a kind of fake empathy, the projection of a stereotype onto Isaac, not the building of community. In a perfect storm of projection, emotional contagion, and the breakdown of empathic boundaries into sentimentality, Helen gets over involved.
Once again, how shall I put it delicately? Pretending to address the fictional heroine, the therapy does not work, Helen, if you sleep with the client. She does. Predictably this blows up any possibility of a rigorous and critical empathy, restoration of wholeness, or overcoming trauma. This is not to say that the sex was not satisfying. Empathy makes for great sex between mutually consenting partners, but regardless of the details, Helen perpetrates a boundary violation. Certainly unethical, possibly illegal, the power differential between therapist and patient is such that the client cannot give consent, even if he initiates the “seduction.” He is a powerful actor in escaping from civil war and so on; but his agency is compromised, and he cannot escape from bad therapy. It is neither empathy nor pity; it is a boundary violation and should not be represented otherwise. Granted, it makes for a great melodrama and a great screen play such as Netflix’s “In session.” Just that the breakdown of boundaries between self and Other in the context of therapy forecloses the client’s, Isaac’s, recovery. Fortunately, his aspirations as a writer—perhaps the shadow cast by Mengestu over his character, Isaac, – showing the latter the way forward. The survivor/perpetrator creates empathy, however incomplete and tentative, for himself in his art.
The cultural difference, language difference, difference in experience, and Isaac’s traditional devaluation of woman’s power, are all obstacle to empathy. This is supposed to invalidate empathy? These are the hidden variables that present obstacles and resistances to empathy. Drive out the obstacles and resistances and empathy naturally comes forth. When the obstacles and resistance are human aggression and empire, that is going to be a big job. Meanwhile, the client and therapist are caught in a double bind. Isaac is already a perpetrator and a survivor. Helen becomes one too. The result is the double bind of moral trauma (a distinction missing from Migrant Aesthetics), to which we shall return momentarily. The relationship between Helen and Isaac fails as tragedy because it delivers wreck and ruin instead of recovery form trauma (whether standard or moral) or artistic transfiguration. However, that does not mean that empathy caused xenophobia. The narrow-minded parochialism of projection causes xenophobia; and the solution to parochialism is expanded empathy. Hey Helen! The therapy doesn’t work if you have sex with the client, though, once gain, it does make great melodrama.
In another story, migrant aesthetics’ mutilated empathy is painfully on display. Migrant Aesthetics writes (p. 7): “The narrator, now known as Jonas, struggles to come to terms both with himself and with his father’s silence about his migration and his physical abuse of the narrator’s mother. One might even argue that the narrator instrumentalizes Yosef’s migration story to explain his own abusive impulses toward his girldfriend.” How shall I put it delicately? Intimate partner physical abuse is not an “instrumentalization”—whatever that is—it is a crime, and should never be represented any other way. Is it not the reader’s empathy—and perhaps the author’s—that is precisely at stake here? This does not mean I am in favor of empire. I am against empire, colonialism, and so on, as well as using them as excuses for people rich with possibility behaving badly.
The next witness to the many mutilations of empathy is Teju Cole’s anti-hero, Juilus, in Open City (2011). Information asymmetries in fiction are at least as old as Oedipus’ not knowing his biological parents—oh boy, did that create some mischief. Arguably Oedipus was the original refugee, seeing as how he was abandoned to die by his biological parents and rescued by poor people from the neighboring country, Thebes.
In addition to information asymmetries, moral ambiguities are key ways of creating engaging narratives. For example, Stephen Boccho’s cop show Hill Street Blues (1981–1987) innovated in dramatizing moral ambiguities. A protagonist is introduced sympathetically, inviting the identification, if not the empathy, of the audience, then he or she does something appalling. The good cop is the bad cop (and vice versa). The viewer’s (reader’s) emotional conflict is guaranteed—and the audience is hooked. Highly derivative, but no less engaging for all that, the mild-manner medical student/resident in psychiatry, Julius, is burdened with an altered mental state, a fugue state not exacty epilepsy and/or resembling multiple personality disorder, in which the “alters” do not know about one another. The issues comes out like a slap to the reader at the end of the story—a surprise attack, Pearl Harbor moment—as Julius is credibly accused of having perpetrated a rape, however, also credibly without remembering it. Gustav Flaubert’s flaneur meets Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jerkel and Mr Hyde, thankfully without the Jack the Ripper gore.
Migrant Aesthetics is explicitly dismissive of trauma studies (e.g., pp. 10, 20). This is unfortunate as such studies are critical path to surviving empire and fighting back. Without empathy, empire gets the last laugh, as nothing is available but fragments of broken human beings and drying bones in the desert, mutilated empathy and mutilated humans.
While migrant aesthetics (the category not merely the title) “calls out” the distinctions that survivors can also be perpetrators (and vice versa) as well as the distinctions trauma and complex trauma, it stumbles—stumbles badly—in applying them. In particular and more problematically, Migrant Aesthetics misses the distinction moral trauma, which is an unfortunate oversight. It might have saved Migrant Aesthetics from simplistic splitting and trying to force a choice between feeling and thinking, positions and persons, truth and empathy.
Though determining the truth remains challenging, even illusive—especially for survivors of violence, war, and trauma—empathy cannot be sustained without a commitment to truth. Thus, the “take down” of war novels that are critical of war (Carpio: 30) is tin-eared in that it misses the moral trauma of soldiers, who are both survivors and perpetrators. Nor is this justification for war crime(s). Some soldiers are put in an impossible situation—they are given a valid military order and innocent people end up getting hurt or killed. The solider is now a perpetrator and a survivor. One cannot practice a rigorous and critical empathy without integrity, commitment to truth, commitment to critical thinking, and fact-based inquiry (granted that “facts” are slippery).
On background, trauma is medically defined at that which causes the person to experience or believe she/he is in imminent risk of dying or being gravely injured. Rape is on the list of grave injuries. Moral trauma is also on the list and includes such things as the Trolley Car Dilemma in which one has to choose between taking no action and killing five people and taking action and killing one; situations such as: “I will kill you if you do not kill this other person” (different than the Trolley Car); double binds such as those occurring to Isaac and Helen; soul murder such as occurs to Winston at the end of Orwell’s 1984; and seemingly valid military orders that result in unintentional harm to innocent people. In moral trauma people can be both perpetrators and survivors, and become just that when someone gets hurt who did not need to get hurt.
Here radical empathy comes into its own. A person is asked to make a decision that no one should have to make. A person is asked to make a decision that no one is entitled to make. A person is asked to make a decision that no one is able to make—and yet the person makes the decision anyway, even if the person does nothing, since doing nothing is a decision. The result is moral trauma—the person is both a perpetrator and a survivor. Now empathize with that. No one said it would be easy.
When one is hanging by a frayed rope with one’s face to the side of the mountain, every mountain looks pretty much the same, granite gray and cold and like one is going to die or be gravely injured (the definition of trauma). Strictly speaking, the challenge is not only that the would-be empathizer was not with the surviving Other when the survivor experienced the life-threatening trauma, but the survivor her- or himself was there and did not have the experience in such a way as to experience it whole and completely. That may sound strange that the survivor did not experience the experience. That is the definition of “unclaimed” experience (Caruth 1996). The traumatic experience is not the kind of overwhelming, fragmenting experience that one would ever want to experience, so neuro-biological mechanisms were deployed by the mind-body (the self) to split off, numb, and defend against experiencing the experience. Isaac, Julius, and Yunior have more than their fair share of that.
Thus trauma survivors report out of body experiences or watching themselves at a distance as the crash occurs or the perpetrator enacts the boundary violation. Or the survivors do not remember what happened or important aspects of it. One is abandoned. Help is not coming—no one is listening. Yet the experience = x keeps coming back in the survivor’s nightmares, flashbacks, or as consciousness flooding anxiety. It comes back as a sense of suffocation, an undifferentiated blackness, or diffuse and flooding fear. The trauma remains split off from the survivor. This is Junot Diaz’s protagonist, Yunior’s “The Curse,” which is the snake-haired Gorgon, the complex trauma. The treatment or therapy consists of the survivor re-experiencing the trauma vicariously from a place of safety. In doing so the trauma loses its power and when it returns (as it inevitably does), it does so with less force, eventually becoming a distant unhappy and painful but not overwhelming memory. (See van der Kolk 2014; LaCapra 2001; Leys 2000; Caruth 1995, 1996; Freud 1920.)
It is precisely the nature of trauma for a person to go through the trauma and yet not be able to grasp, comprehend, or integrate the trauma in their other life experiences. Extreme situations—that threaten death or dismemberment—call forth radical empathy. Standard empathy is challenged by extreme situations out of remote, hard-to-grasp experiences to become radical empathy. As noted, some remote, hard to grasp situations are remote and hard to grasp even for the people who go through the situations and survive them. That the experience is unintegrated and sequestered in a split off part of the personality and corresponding neurological sector is precisely what makes the experience a trauma (van der Kolk 2014; LaCapra 2001; Leys 2000; Caruth 1995, 1996; Freud 1920). Hence, the need for radical empathy.
Radical empathy is called forth by extreme situations, with which migrant literature is dense, in which radical translation is the bridge between self and Other. Ultimately, radical empathy consists in being fully present with the survivor, acknowledging the survivor’s humanity, and if there are no survivors, as a special case, then radical empathy is with the memory of the victim in the shocked and suffering community—those bones in the Arizona desert over which no one prayed or reflected. Radical empathy acknowledges, witnesses, recognizes, that the survivor will be able to “move on” with life when what had to be survived = x becomes a resource for her or him, in which “resource” means a source of empathy, in which the person is able to be contributed to Others. As regards the victims, those who do not survive, their remembrance becomes the resource, the source of empathy that contributes to the community of Others.
Thus, the third witness is Junot Diaz. “The Curse”—a major distinction in Diaz—is that one cannot have a standard, “normal” relationship in a history bounded by slavery, exploitation, and ongoing abuse. Survivors of domestic violence can be burdened with Stockholm Syndrome, identification with the aggressor, and related derealization phenomena. Recovery, whether in the form of formal therapy or writerly artistic transfiguration of the trauma—requires that the survivor be relatively safe and not entangled in ongoing perpetrations. The challenge to Diaz and anyone who wants to write criticism about his work is that, as noted, we lack a picture of what a healthy relationship looks like. As an exercise, the reader may try to find an example of a healthy relationship that allows for empathic relatedness in this work.
With Diaz, migrant aesthetics moves from minimalist writing degree zero to a chorus of voices in one’s head that is Joycean and near manic in its intensity: “Yunior’s hyperbolic and promiscuous narrative style—mixing everything from Dominican Spanish to African American slang to ‘tropical magic realism […] hip-hop machismo, [and] post-modern pyrotechnics’—yields a certain interpretive flexibility in defining the Curse” (Carpio: 165). The reader gets a sense of the toxic gangster rap which the protagonist had to survive and which, to an extent, still obsessively lives on in the practices and performances in his thinking and relating. The voices in his head are a bad neighborhood, and it is tempting to urge, “Don’t go there! You’re gonna get mugged!” Lots of violence. This is trauma writing.
The following is not the truth and consider the possibility (and it applies not only to Diaz): Diaz’s “The Curse” is Medusa’s snake-haired Gorgon—it turns one to stone—literally in the story and emotionally if one is in the audience. It is trauma, complex trauma, moral trauma. Historically it is violence, sexual violence, all kinds of violence, and soul murder, murdering the capacity for empathy. An argument can be made that Diaz, however clumsily and ineptly, is trying to use his art like the mythical Perseus’ magic shield to reflect and refract the complex moral trauma in such a way that it can be mitigated and contained and soothed, even if not disappeared or completely healed. And, in its own way, that is the high art of empathy.
Migrant Aesthetics (Carpio: 171): “Becoming and falling for Trujillo-like goons are sure signs of the Curse for Dominicans, and Diaz leaves no doubt about its [wide] range …” Examples of intimate partner violence, abuse (domestic violence), and “toxic masculinity,” are called out as that with which the protagonist struggles. On background, Trujillo was the local dictator of the Dominican Republic (1930–1961), who was sustained by US imperialism and corporate money from banana plantations and mining. Hence, the origin of the expression “banana republic.”
Migrant Aesthetics rites of the protagonist (p. 173): “Yunior identifies his Dominicanness with his experience of the Curse, and that his compulsive promiscuity is a legacy of a long history of colonial misogyny and violence [….] culminates with the story “A cheater’s guide to love.” As noted, Yunior has probably never seen an example of a healthy relationship nor will the reader find one here in Diaz—though obviously Migrant Aesthetics does not advocate for the violence, misogyny, and so on.
Migrant Aesthetics is at risk. It is fascinated and needs Diaz for the academic distinction “migrant aesthetics.” In its own way, Migrant Aestheticsnnbecomes another sparrow among sparrows—Ana, Ybón, Lola, La Inca—to the hypnotic attraction of the gangsta snake. These are vulnerable, abused women who are candidates to be trafficked. Such women are in an altered mental status, semi-permanently conditioned by trauma from a young age, and they seem to go for those “bad boys.” No good comes of it. Nor is this necessarily to blame the snake. Even Dale Carnegie, of winning friends and influencing people fame, acknowledges that if your parents were snakes, then you would be a snake too. The snake may have to be quarantined to protect the community, but that does not mean the perpetrator does not need treatment. He does, though he all-too-rarely gets it.
In summary, it is not a choice between expanding empathy and ending/reducing empire, and an engagement with both is needed. Survivors ask for empathy. When survivors are asked, “What do you want—what would make it better? What would soothe the trauma?” then rarely do they say punish the perpetrator (though occasionally they do). Mostly they ask for acknowledgement, to be heard and believed, to hear the truth about what happened, for apology, accountability, restitution, rehabilitation, prevention of further wrong (see Herman 2023). Rarely do survivors make forgiveness a goal if that would require further interaction with the perpetrator (though self-forgiveness should not be dismissed). It bears repeating: survivors ask for empathy, not an end to empire, though, once again, both are needed. Thus, the utopian false consciousness of survivors and migrant aesthetics?
The final witness in this engagement with empathy and empire is Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine (2002). I was about to write that the internment of over 127K Japanese citizens during World War II was “extra judicial,” but then a colleague pointed out to me that the US Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the internment camps in the December 1944 Korematsu v. United States decision. This disgraceful decision was rebuked and finally overturned in 2018. Reparations were finally approved in 1988 by the Civil Liberties Act and enacted into law. In spite of its inadequacy to the injustice some forty years later, such a gesture may have created a space in which recognition of wrong, apology, recovery, and healing were imaginable.
In the face of this disgraceful internment of Japanese citizens during World War II by the US government, Julie Otsuka writes: “I didn’t write this book with an angry screed, and I didn’t want it to be a moralizing book. I just wanted it to be a book people and what they had gone through. I hope it’s an experience that the reader can enter” (cited in Caprio: 135). Sounds like a request for empathy. Amidst the anger and moralizing, which require a committed empathic effort to stop from making a bad situation worse, Otsuka’s commitment to empathy shines through. Without empathy, the family’s anger, grief, despair, and longing would read like a railroad time table (when the trains were on strike!). The minimalist language powerfully marshalled by Otsuka—see the above about “writing degree zero”—lets the empathy land powerfully as a gut punch to any reader who has been paying attention. Pets are not allowed in the internment camp, and the mother kills the family dog (p. 135), which is to say the mother kills childhood, innocence, decency, love, kindness, hope, relatedness—and, above all, empathy. Over the entrance to the internment camp is written: “Abandon empathy, all ye who enter here,” which does not mean the narrative lacks empathy or is not about empathy. One is never hungrier for empathy than when it is missing. As noted at the start of this debate, empathy is so fundamental an aspect of one’s being human, that lack of empathy can be seen as being inhuman (e.g., Keen 2008: 6; Blankenship 2019: 38).
Notwithstanding the powerful rhetorical empathy marshalled by Otsuka, migrant aesthetics asserts that “stylistic restraint” short-circuits empathy ( Carpio: 135 (regarding “rhetorical empathy” see Blankenship 2019)). Migrant aesthetics aligns empathy with fake “sentimentality” (another name for “empathy” (Carpio: 147)). That does not mean that empathy is not relevant; it means without empathy, humans are physically, emotionally, morally, and spiritually dismembered into fragments of human beings.
In short, the rumor of empathy remains a rumor in the case of Migrant Aesthetics; the rumor is not confirmed; and empathy does not live in this work. It is where empathy goes to become projection, emotional contagion, and fake empathy. It is where empathy goes to become mutilated empathy like mutilated fragments of human bones in the desert. Don’t go there.
References
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Lou Agosta. (2010). Empathy in the Context of Philosophy. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Hannah Arendt. (1964). Im Gespräch mit Günter Gaus (1964): Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVSRJC4KAiE [checked on 10/20/1950]
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Lisa Blankenship. (2019). Changing the Subject: A Theory of Rhetorical Empathy. Logan UT: Utah State University Press.
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Dominick LaCapra. (1999). Trauma, absence, loss. Critical Inquiry, Summer, 1999, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Summer, 1999): 696–727
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Stephen Levinson. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Toni Morrison. (1987). Beloved. New York: Vintage Int.
Namwali Serpall. (2019). The banality of empathy. The New York Review: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2019/03/02/the-banality-of-empathy/?lp_txn_id=1496946 [checked on 10/20/2023].
(Bessel) van der Kolk. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. New York: Viking Press.
Ruth R. Wisse. (2013). No Joke: Making Jewish Humor. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Micah Zenko. (2015). Red Team: How to Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy. New York: Basic Books.
[1] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVSRJC4KAiE ; see also Agosta 2010: 70–77.
© Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Categories: a rigorous and critical empathy, empathic distress, empathic receptivity, empathic understanding, empathy against fanaticism, Empathy and Literature, migrant aesthetics, mutilated empathy, radical empathy
Empathy Lessons 