The risks of empathy: Interrogating multiculturalism's gaze
Abstract
Empathy is widely embraced as a means of educating the social imagination; from John Dewey to Martha Nussbaum, Cornel West to bell 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 comicbook 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.
Cite this
Megan Boler (1997). The risks of empathy: Interrogating multiculturalism's gaze. Cultural Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502389700490141
@article{megan1997the,
title = {The risks of empathy: Interrogating multiculturalism's gaze},
author = {Boler, Megan},
year = {1997},
journal = {Cultural Studies},
doi = {10.1080/09502389700490141}
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