Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy

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.