Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy

Empathy has become a Euro-American political obsession. Although commentators have insisted that empathy can play an important role in mediating relations between different social and cultural groups and across national and geo-political boundaries, relatively scant attention has been paid to what ‘the transnational’ signifies in this context or how we might theorise the relationship between empathy and transnational relations. As such, we have little insight into how empathy emerges and flows through global circuits of power, and the complex ways in which it transforms and translates as it travels between and imbricates diverse cultural, social and geographical contexts. Taking us beyond universalist calls to ‘put oneself in the other’s shoes’, this paper examines empathy’s dynamic relationships to processes of location, translation, imagination and attunement. This explores the ways that emotions are radically shaped by relations of history, power and violence and contemplates the possibilities of empathies expressed from the margins.