Imperfect Solidarities

It is hard to write a review about such an eye-opening book.
I requested this one because of the focus of empathy in the description.
The description is accurate in many ways, however, this book is also about ‘care’.
It is divided into chapters that discuss different aspects of solidarity, with examples from art.
My favourite chapters were Coda, and the part of the chapter titled Mistranslation and Revolution that talks about empathy.
This is a long political art book about solidarity and empathy.
The best audience for this are those interested in political art, exhibitions and literature, and who like to read critical essays.

Thanks to NetGalley and Columbia/Floating Opera Press Press for the ARC!

Aruna D’Souza’s "Imperfect Solidarities" is a brilliant essay on the failures of empathy as a political tool, which, she argues, should lead us to recognize an obligation of care without it.

If you’ve spent any time online, you know that there’s been a great deal of talk about the burden to bear witness to atrocity. I mean, genocide now comes with sponsored BetterHelp ads. The problem, D’Souza argues, is that an obligation to empathetically “witness” becomes a voyeuristic right to watch—to objectify. Real lives become dependent on how we feel about them, and this practice stratifies power structures because pity assumes that its object is lesser. Furthermore, empathy doesn’t actually effect change, which is why a presidency can verbally condemn genocide while funding it. Empathy sanctions all behavior as a viable outlet for grief.

Critically, D’Souza argues that empathy is an act of translation, which means that it re-mediates experience until it is palatable enough for white people to consume and “feel something” about. Remember KONY 2012? The need to understand can be its own kind of erasure because it attempts to contain atrocity to a common language. How substantial can care be when it is on the terms of those unaffected by violence?

What’s the alternative? To act first and feel later.

D’Souza calls us to instead sit comfortably with the reality of opacity and mistranslation—“to be able to act together without full comprehension, to be able to float on the seas of change.” We have an obligation to help; we don't always have a right to know.

In the age of internet advocacy, "Imperfect Solidarities" feels like a necessary course-correction. We shouldn’t need to see mangled bodies to act—we shouldn’t need to be “convinced” that they are “worth it.” If we need to look directly at violence, we're complicit in it.