The risks of empathy: Interrogating multiculturalism's gaze

Journal/Book: Cult Stud. 1997; 11: 11 New Fetter Lane, London, England EC4P 4EE. Routledge. 253-273.

Abstract: Empathy is widely embraced as a means of educating the social imagination; from John Dewey to Martha Nussbaum, Cornel West to hell hooks, we find empathy advocated as the foundation for democracy and social change. In this article I examine how students' readings of Art Spiegelman's MAUS, a comic-book genre depiction of his father's survival of Nazi Germany, produces the Aristotelian version of empathy advocated by Nussbaum. This 'passive empathy', I argue, falls far short of assuring any basis for social change, and reinscribes a 'consumptive' mode of identification with the other. I invoke a 'semiotics of empathy', which emphasizes the power and social hierarchies which complicate the relationship between reader/listener and text/speaker. I argue that educators need to encourage what I shall define as 'testimonial reading' which requires the reader's responsibility.

Note: Article Boler M, Univ Auckland, Auckland 1, NEW ZEALAND

Keyword(s): empathy; emotion; testimony; MAUS; reading; power

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