Imperfect Solidarities

by Aruna d'Souza

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Art, Politics, Criticism

116 pages, Paperback

Published August 13, 2024

Reviews

[Ash · Rating 4 out of 5]

what if we could care for/about people even if we don't understand them? what if we don't need to understand eachother to care?

[kari trail · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book was such a special find. really well-written and researched with care… made me think a lot! and underline even more!

“what if we imagined a form of political solidarity that was not based on empathy but on its opposite—on imperfect solidarity; a solidarity defined by its respect for opacity? are there ways to sit with the unknowability of the other and still care for and with them, without translating ourselves into their terms? are there ways to understand the world outside of the binaries of self and other, instead embracing the fundamental interconnectedness of human (and, in this time of environmental collapse, nonhuman) life? what would it mean if our politics were based not on our ability to empathize with people whose experiences are distant from our own, but on our willingness to care for others just by virtue of their being beings?… care is infinitely harder than love, because it often requires us to act in spite of our empathy, rather than because of it—it requires us to place the cause of justice ahead of our own feelings.”

[Aurelia Littlepage · Rating 5 out of 5]

I need to buy this book so I can underline every single word. There are so many quotes I loved but I think my favorite is “ Care before love-or care before empathy: this is the politics I aspire to. A solidarity that comes very directly from a commitment to care because that is the most basic obligation we have toward each other.”Like you should not need to be convinced of someone’s humanity in order to care for their wellbeing!!! I feel this is an inherent concept that most humans would agree with yet we live in a world that has lost the plot when it comes to a social contract. The every man for himself capitalist mindset is gonna be death of all of us. D’Souza’s critique of empathy is exemplified through her analysis of Candice Breitz and Stephanie Syjuco work exploring the intricacies of solidarity.

[Katie Moloney · Rating 4 out of 5]

quotes of note:

“intersectional feminism is not an expansion of liberal white feminism but a decentering of it”

viewing world in binary of self or other

how can you not end up loving something that you have to take care of

like yes conceptually I agree with care as a basic human right and agree it should be the default if you dont understand each other but maybe (and maybe this is my north-american black and white good v bad view) if i understand and disagree with someone i dont want to care? maybe i would be less jaded if it werent 2025 year of our dictator

[Natalie Wehrer · Rating 5 out of 5]

A piece that covers so much in so little space. Like a brilliant short story, this piece weaves together a narrative that crosses time and cultures to create a representation of what we are living as we are living it. I am so impressed by the force of this piece and will be recommending this to anybody who will listen to me.

[Litteraturisten · Rating 5 out of 5]

yes!! 🔥🔥🔥

D’Souza menar att vi behöver föreställa oss en form av politisk solidaritet som inte är baserad på empati, utan på den mycket svårare skyldigheten att vara omsorgsfull.

Vad skulle det innebära om vår politik inte baserades på vår förmåga att känna empati med människor vars erfarenheter är avlägsna från våra egna, utan på vår vilja att ta hand om andra bara i kraft av deras existens?

"A solidarity that comes very directly from comitment to care because that is the most basic obligation we have toward each other."

[Kimia Domire · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book at the bookshop of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and bought it because it looked interesting.

This is the type of long essay that effectively synthesises a series of ideas and areas of research with which the author is clearly already plenty familiar and has spent a lot of time with throughout her career. The argument is that empathy is actually a misguided state for us to appeal to in our politics, or even to aspire towards employing ourselves. She breaks this down by describing every pitfall of empathy and the strengths of not-understanding. This is done by reference to works of art, curation and literature.

I had one disappointment. The book opens by eloquently taking the reader through an up to date account of what's been happening in Gaza as of publishing in 2024. I appreciated that this was done. It serves as a live documentation of history in the present. However, it is never returned to. As I read to the end of the book, I was hoping to see the argument brought back to this starting point, but the circuit never looped back up. We just end on some personal anecdotes.

This book is confident, clean and succinct. I loved the writing style, which I think helped with the overall persuasiveness. It is a much needed critique of the liberal idea of "empathy" as the answer to injustice. It's not too long. I would recommend it to anyone interested in activism, justice and progressive politics.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kinda introductory

[Brice Montgomery · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley and Columbia/Floating Opera 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.

[Xin · Rating 4 out of 5]

“What if we imagined a form of political solidarity that was not based on empathy but on its opposite—on imperfect solidarity; a solidarity defined by its respect for opacity? Are there ways to sit with the unknowability of the other and still care for and with them, without translating ourselves into their terms? What would it mean if our politics were based not on our ability to empathize with people whose experiences are distant from our own, but on our willingness to care for others just by virtue of their being beings?”

These are the conversations which this book explores, which I found fascinating and enlightening. I love well written essays, and this was definitely written with research and careful consideration. Topics such as intersectionality, colonialism, and Translation are also brought up. Here are some notable texts (which I scanned) I found interesting

“First because, as historians have shown, racism did not come before institutions-institutions created the need for racism. The racialization of Black Africans happened in order to justify slavery—white Europeans had to argue that dark-skinned Africans were something less than fully human in order to rationalize treating them as such.“

“Only six years before, in 1898, after a series of military conflicts with Spain, the United States had signed the Treaty of Paris, which transferred a number of former Spanish colonies-including Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines—to its control.
With these two acts-the violent seizure of land from Indigenous peoples in North America and another from people beyond its borders—a country borne out of resistance to British colonizers had become a colonizer in its own right.”

[M]

In Imperfect Solidarities, the art historian and critic Aruna D'Souza argues against empathy as a political tool, because "it depends on the ability to translate the experience of another into one’s own language" (p.27). Instead, she argues for the power of mistranslation, for staying together despite misunderstandings, for seeing and fighting for common interests without trying to capture the other into our language completely. I'm drawn by her arguments because I find myself both agreeing and disagreeing. Simultaneously, I agree with a lot of what she says about empathy, and disagree with her conclusion of discarding it. Because empathy is predicated on individual transformation and because its language is easily twisted, it should not stand ground for political action - it can't, she posits. Yet later in the book D'Souza suggests that we rely on care practices, that care "requires us to act in spite of our empathy" (p. 84). I am wary to believe it is so, because care, too, arises from somewhere. (This is an excerpt from an essay I am writing about these issues).

I find this book to be great to think-with and I really recommend it to anyone interested in the concepts of empathy and solidarity.

Thanks to Net-Galley for the E-arc!

[sofia ines · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Care before love--or care before empathy"

"What an imperfect solidarity might look like--one based on temporary, context-specific alliances, one that allows difference and even contradiction to remain intact, and that sees such contradiction as a strength, not a weakness" (24)

"The liberal mindset is not that different than the conservative one in that it needs to see conflict as a moral battle between good versus evil, or between perptrators of violence versus victims of violence (each of these seen as fixed and immutable rather than contingent), and thus can only find empathy in the identification of and with pure innocence. Liberalism cannot abide the idea that liberation struggles are often bloody and messy..."
"Empathy is not a necessary prerequisite for a common cause, Glissant insists: 'To feel in solidarity with [the other] or build with him or to like what he does, it is not necessary for me to grasp him, It is not necessary to try to become the other (to become other) nor to 'make him in my image'" (54)

[Madeleine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This essay was mentioned in "Hierarchien der Solidarität: Hierarchies of Solidarity" by Sinthujan Varatharajah, Moshtari Hilal, so I picked it up because the title intrigued me.
In recent months we have seen the limits of empathy as a way to generate solidarity, while looking at the genocides unfolding in Gaza and Congo at the same time. And I've personally felt uncomfortable while sharing both the traumatic videos and images, as well as the humanizing, heroic stories coming out of both places (with Gaza receiving much more attention) over the question "how messed up is it that I even feel the need to share this in the hopes that more people will care? how messed up is it that these people feel compelled to show us these moments (both horrible and intimate) in order for us to care and not ignore them".
I don't know much about the art world, so reading the different examples that d'Souza weaves into the essay was really interesting and enlightening as well.

[Katherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elaborates on a lot of what I think about re: hypervisibility, the ways in which humanitarian work forces people to be legible only as victims at the mercy of whether the audience has sufficient 'empathy' to pay attention (in an attention economy that makes paying attention *hard* and certainly *impossible* if it is meant to rely on empathy -- even when functioning at its 'logical' best, empathy is subject to compassion fatigue...at its worst, empathy works much like race as technology or the exclusionary category of "human" (as it emerged and was defined via scientific racism/phrenology) does, forcing the hypervisibility of the other *as* other and/or becoming a question of deserving (who is deserving of empathy, or being part of this category called 'human' where empathy is possible?)

Extremely brief, but useful and thoughtful examples, and another point in the favor of reading Edouard Glissant sooner rather than later. (Poetics of Relation, specifically!) My thanks to the Rabkin Foundation for lending me their copy :)

[John White · Rating 4 out of 5]

Across a series of short chapters, D’Souza argues that we need a politics/ethics of care rather than our current political climate that valorizes an all-too-often easy or uncritical empathy. Using Glissant, she argues for people’s right to opacity and suggests that we must care for each other across difference rather than seek to ‘understand’ our differences in a manner that typically flattens identities and reifies whiteness. She draws on compelling artworks and is a clear and concise writer. Indeed, the book (manifesto-like) can be read in under an hour. I think the arguments and material can and should sustain lengthier contextualization. For instance, she gives little to no acknowledgement of authors (such as Saidiya Hartman) who already have made such arguments about the pitfalls of empathy.

[Laura Martens · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Care before love—or care before empathy: this is the politics I aspire to. A solidarity that comes very directly from a commitment to care because that is the most basic obligation we have toward each other. […] Care is infinitely harder than love, because it often requires us to act in spite of our empathy, rather than because of it—it requires us to place the cause of justice ahead of our own feelings. But the solidarities it creates […] are the solidarities that focus on what needs to be done collectively. Modeling this—not only in our political praxis, but in our writing, our art making, our curating—allows us to reimagine the terms of how and why we come to-gether, clearing a space for real transformation.”
(pp. 83–84)

[Olga · Rating 3 out of 5]

This essay series feels like a critique of different approaches to art, social media, and the ways white culture often absorbs or reshapes collective struggles. I appreciated the opening discussion on Palestine, especially because I believe every conversation about justice should begin with Palestine. That part felt necessary and grounded.

However, as the text continued, the argument shifted into something more controversial, and at times, it even felt somewhat exclusionary. The author speaks about intersectional feminism and acknowledges that our struggles are shaped by race and class, yet the essay itself reads as biased in a way that left me confused. The message about solidarity did not always feel coherent, and I wasn’t sure how all the pieces came together.

[Beline Xu · Rating 3 out of 5]

prachtige kaft! ik verdwaalde wat in het voorlaatste hoofdstuk, met alle voorbeelden die ik moeilijk kon visualiseren (die ik makkelijk kon opzoeken maar niet meteen zin in had). al bij al heeft dit boek een belangrijke boodschap: care before love and empathy. je hoeft elkaar niet 100% te begrijpen om voor elkaar te kunnen zorgen. we hebben een menselijke drang om te zorgen voor elkaar en de wereld. dat mogen we niet vergeten. soms voor je eigen voordeel, soms voor een gezamenlijk voordeel, als het maar win-win is!

[Lisa Davidson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is such an important and timely topic. I agree with the author that we spend too much time and energy basing our treatment of others on feelings we have instead of seeking justice for its own sake. I love the idea of political solidarity based on care when people are so divided. Thanks to NetGalley for letting me read this

[Lizzi Skalka · Rating 5 out of 5]

A simple thesis: what if we act in solidarity of oppressed people even if we can’t understand them? D’Souza explains the value of solidarity regardless of empathy, as well as the right to opacity, unknowability, in individuals and global communities. Poignant, especially now.

[Michaela Y-M · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gem of essays, not a word wasted. There is so much to sink your teeth into here on art, literature, solidarity, opacity, and moving beyond the politics of empathy to (obligatory) justice-focused care.

[Sadie · Rating 5 out of 5]

It feels like I almost shouldn’t write a review to this. Rating it feels like I am quantifying the intelligence and argument, which feels devaluing and counter productive. Nonetheless it’s a very thought provoking read.

[Obi · Rating 4 out of 5]

VERY ENLIGHTENING AND POWERFUL! IF EVERYONE READ THIS AND UNDERSTOOD THE WORLD WOULD PROBABLY BE SAVED.

[miss smiley rylee :) · Rating 5 out of 5]

this + all about love + ordinary notes + this bridge called my back

[Molly Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Care before love ✊❤️.