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ABSTRACT
Postcolonial theory, with its focus on epistemological difference, material subversion, and cultural hybridity, is said to be at odds with the emotional and cognitive takeover implied in empathy. My paper will, to the contrary, suggest that the critique of political developmentalism and the turn towards a preference for cultural difference that inaugurated postcolonial studies as we know it may have actually helped to forge a relation between the perspectives of postcolonial theory and empathy. This relation is based on the ultimately individual focus that both imply through their rejection of abstract rational politics, which politically limits them to humanitarianism. My reading of Indra Sinha's Animal's People will show how this novel performs the heavy impact of this entanglement between postcolonial otherness, empathy, and humanitarianism by arguing that the novel ironically restructures its plot and political imaginary to suit the needs of humanitarian empathy that governs the global market for postcolonial literatures.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Jens Elze is a junior professor in English literature at the University of Goettingen. His research interests and publications include the fields of Renaissance drama, postcolonial studies, realism and the history of the novel, literature and economics.
Notes
1 For a more extensive reading of Animal's People in the context of precarity and postcolonial justice, see Chapter 6 of my Postcolonial Modernism and the Picaresque Novel: Literatures of Precarity (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2017).