Pedwell’s rich study examines the diverse ways in which empathy is mobilised – from political speeches that uphold neoliberalism, to postcolonial literatures that refuse certain forms of empathic connection. Empathy is an affective relation often conceptualized in liberal and neoliberal thought as the imaginative and felt ability to “put oneself in the other’s shoes”. In challenging the appropriative dynamics of this mode of perspective taking, alongside its assumptions of universality, Affective Relations underscores the multiple configurations of empathy across different contexts. As empathy is produced and circulated transnationally, it is used for divergent political ends: it may reinforce dominant economic, political and cultural relations but it may also open up the possibility for transformative social justice. Pedwell’s development of the concept of affective translation is key to this latter potential as the contested (re)production of affect across borders produces what she calls “alternative empathies”, that is, “ways of sensing, being and feeling that do not simply confirm what we think we already know” (page 189).

The framework of Affective Relations is strongly interdisciplinary, bringing literatures from feminism, postcolonialism, neuroscience, psychoanalysis and popular science into dialogue. It often reads (or translates) one through the lens of the other, sometimes against the grain, to deliver insights. This is an ambitious project that highlights how empathy materialises in different spheres, through different media, and through different types of encounter. Dovetailing with approaches to emotions as relational feelings, empathy thus appears as highly contingent and shifting, both discursive and material. It is important to note that Pedwell does not draw a discrete line between affect and emotion. At times she uses these terms interchangeably on the basis that, although emotions may be conceptualized as named feelings that remain separate from a broader affective felt experience, the experience of emotion is messy, with individuals not always knowing how they feel or able to articulate their feelings. The titular phrase intentionally captures this imprecision and ambiguity, with the book focused on the work of affect, rather than trying to assume or define what it is. This fluidity in terminology may jar for some readers given the extensive debates around, and political investments in, distinctions between affect and emotion (for instance, see Thien, 2005; McCormack, 2006; Pile, 2010). Overall, however, the effect is to give an impression of how affect and emotion work in dialogue with one another.

The first two chapters critique the idea that empathy creates social justice and personal transformation, instead highlighting that this affective relation is easily appropriated by neoliberal regimes to reinforce existing social, racial, gender and economic hierarchies. Drawing upon President Obama’s political memoirs and speeches, Chapter One examines how feminist and anti-racist understandings of empathy as an ethics of care is co-opted by neoliberal politics. Empathy conceptualized as an individual capacity that can address inequality cannot be divorced from making American citizens more risk-taking and entrepreneurial. Empathy is therefore cultivated not out of moral obligation, but out of a desire to increase the nation’s economic competitiveness. This production of the “empathy economy” uses affective relations in order to know other people, exploit markets and create profit, therefore maintaining dominant social and economic orders, notably the multinational corporation. However, in examining ‘Obamamania’ in the US and beyond, the chapter highlights the contradictions and unevenness of affective relations. The intertwining of empathy, hope and imagination allows certain populations to be empathised with at the expense of others as different visions, experiences and investments come to the fore. Pedwell thus draws attention to the work of empathy as a “political space of mediation” that is critical and recognises the political ambivalence of affect (page 46).

Chapter Two focuses more explicitly on the idea of empathy as personal self-transformation by examining the discourse about, and experience of, immersions (when workers from international development or aid agencies travel to spend time living with a family in a developing world context in order to see their lives first hand). Feminist, antiracist and international development literatures often assume that empathy is produced through intimacy and geographical proximity, leading to unsettling experiences that facilitate the recognition that privileged ‘western’ subjects are complicit in power relations. As a result, empathy can create personal and social transformation. However, Pedwell argues that immersive encounters often obscure existing hierarchies and inequalities. Indeed, existing power relations may be bolstered as the ‘poor other’ remains fixed and untransformed whilst western professionals have their authority and affective capacities enhanced. Drawing upon literatures in media and visual culture, the chapter poses whether distance and detachment can enable more critical forms of empathic relation and responsibility.

Chapters Three and Four challenge the universalist assumptions inherent in much political thought surrounding affect and emotion, whilst also working to ‘decolonize’ affect theory. The analysis focuses on postcolonial literature, namely, Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place (1989) and Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love (2010), illustrating how these texts offer insights into the reconceptualization of emotional politics. The chapters develop the book’s discussion of alternative empathies, that is ways of feeling and configuring empathy that complicate, if not directly challenge and refuse, the assumption that by imaginatively “putting oneself in the other’s shoes”, social ills, differences and antagonisms can be overcome. More specifically, Chapter Three traces the limits of empathic encounters in contexts where empathy is ignored or rejected by those it is intended to reach. By analysing A Small Place, Pedwell illustrates the production of confrontational and critically discomforting forms of empathy, particularly when it works in dialogue with emotions such as shame, anger and sadness. As this configuration of empathy by those “on the margins” comes into conflict with western liberal assumptions, the chapter not only illustrates how the production and felt experience of empathy is shaped by different locations and by differently positioned subjects, but also how power relations can be disrupted and transformed. Such confrontations potentially enable individuals to place themselves within broader historical, political, economic and transnational relations, facilitating an awareness of their role in perpetuating existing power relations.

Chapter Four develops this discussion by critically analysing assumptions surrounding how empathy involves not simply the ability to know another individual subject but also another social, cultural or political context. Focusing on The Memory of Love, the chapter explores cross-cultural expressions of empathy in transnational circuits of power, arguing for an understanding of empathy as affective translation. This is a translation not in the sense of a faithful reproduction of feeling, but as a complex process that involves conflict, dissonance and negotiation with potentially transformative results. In so doing, the chapter moves away from understandings of empathy premised upon emotional equivalence. Such ideas obscure how emotional relations can perpetuate inequality and violence, reinforce the idea that non-western ‘other’ cultures are inferior or backwards, and ignore the locational politics of how emotions are differentially felt and produced. Forna’s novel exposes these limitations and illuminates how a politics of solidarity might emerge through being affected by difference, creating affective connections, synchronisations and rhythms that encompass conflict and resistance, thereby allowing new emotional ways of being and knowing to emerge.

The final substantive chapter further develops the idea of affective translation via a critical engagement with Darwinian theory, neuroscience, psychoanalysis and cultural, social and political theory. Popular scientific literature on empathy, notably Frans de Waal’s The Age of Empathy (2010), mobilises a powerful scientific view of affect as the result of evolution, but such perspectives, based upon ideas of homeostasis, stability and survival, work to maintain the neoliberal status quo. Pedwell critically translates such texts, reading them through the lens of feminist and postcolonial writing on race and science to view empathy as a form of affective biopolitics, “the ontological relationality among forces that fuel material life” (page 180). Such a perspective adds a more material dimension to the overall study of empathy. It attends to the role of neural circuits in the production, reproduction, and potential transformation of affective relations, and addresses how the unconscious dynamics of affect are embedded in transnational relations of power and responsibility. Empathy is thus no longer seen as an affective relation that needs to be generated to smooth over social ills but one that is always present, ready to be mobilised into new ways of becoming and being.

Empathy is therefore presented in its multiplicity as a mode of perspective taking, as a form of affective governmentality, as equivalence or encounter, and as a relation of confrontation and negotiation. Affective Relations explores how possibilities for being and becoming are shaped by geographical, political, social, economic and gendered positions, raising questions around who has investments in particular forms of empathy, who benefits from its mobilisation and how affect works as much to maintain the status quo as to disrupt it. Although the book takes a feminist and postcolonial perspective on affect, its critical interweaving of a wide-range of literatures successfully crosses the lacuna between such perspectives and non-representational approaches on affect that have emerged in human geography in recent years. It is also interesting to read Pedwell's book alongside Ben Anderson’s Encountering Affect (2014), as similar themes, contexts, and occasionally, perspectives emerge across both texts (e.g. the biopolitical, Obama and hope) but they operate in slightly different ways.

My only query comes from a geographical perspective on transnationalism. Throughout the book, the transnational opens up multiple forms of affective production, encounter, translation, circulation and politics by enabling an attention to different sites and positions. In part, it is therefore the transnational that complicates the universalism associated with empathy and that allows for an exploration of how affects shift or “stick” in contexts that are forever being transformed by external forces (Ahmed, 2004). However, transnationalism appears unevenly across the chapters as a whole and at times feels assumed, particularly during discussions of neoliberalism. The transnational is often figured as a space or distance to be traversed, an idea that geographers have long critiqued (Mitchell, 1997), despite the book’s emphasis on different contexts. For this reader, therefore, Affective Relations could more fully, and consistently, articulate how affect constitutes transnational geographies and geopolitics. Nevertheless, this should not detract from a detailed, rigorous, and wide-ranging study that exposes the complexities that surround the politics of empathy. 

References

Ahmed S (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Anderson B (2014) Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions. Basingstoke and New York: Ashgate.

McCormack DP (2006) For the love of pipes and cables: a response to Deborah Thien. Area 38: 330-332.

Mitchell K (1997) Transnational discourse: bringing geography back in. Antipode 29: 101-114.

Pile S (2010) Emotions and affect in recent human geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35: 5-20.

Thien D (2005) After or beyond feeling? A consideration of affect and emotion in geography. Area 37: 450-456.