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Affect at the margins: Alternative empathies in A Small Place

Pedwell, Carolyn (2013) Affect at the margins: Alternative empathies in A Small Place. Emotion, Space and Society, 8 . pp. 18-26. ISSN 1755-4586. (doi:10.1016/j.emospa.2012.07.001) (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:42861)

The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided.
Official URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2012.07.001

Abstract

Against the contemporary universalist injunction to ‘be empathetic’, this paper explores the possibilities of what I call ‘alternative empathies’ in the aftermath of the Atlantic slave trade and European colonialism. Offering an affective reading of Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place ( 1988/2000), it examines how empathy expressed at the margins of postcolonial imaginaries might disrupt or refigure some of the dominant ways that affect is thought and mobilised in pervasive Euro-American liberal and neoliberal discourses. As a powerful commentary on the cultural, political, economic and affective links between slavery, colonialism, and contemporary practices of tourism in the Caribbean that has provoked intense emotional responses among its readers, A Small Place offers a pertinent site through which to consider how history, power and violence shape the meanings and effects of empathy. It illustrates how the affective afterlives of decolonisation shape contemporary subjectivities in ways that are not easy to penetrate, nor possible to undo, through the power of empathetic will alone. Yet it also points to the role that alternative empathies can play in interrogating ideas of time as linear and universal and space as self-contained, revealing how we live affectively through different temporalities and spatialities – with varying implications for our senses of possibility in and for the world. I thus argue that exploring alternative empathies might open out to affective politics which do not view emotions instrumentally as sources of – or solutions to – complex social and political problems, but rather examine diverse and shifting relations of feeling for what they might tell us about the affective workings of power in a transnational world.

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.1016/j.emospa.2012.07.001
Uncontrolled keywords: A Small Place; Affect; Empathy; Melancholia; Postcoloniality; Shame
Subjects: H Social Sciences
H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform
Divisions: Divisions > Division for the Study of Law, Society and Social Justice > School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research
Depositing User: Carolyn Pedwell
Date Deposited: 09 Sep 2014 14:27 UTC
Last Modified: 16 Nov 2021 10:17 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/42861 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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