Empathetic trappings: Revisiting the nineteenth century in Octavia Butler's Kindred

ABSTRACT

Octavia Butler's 1979 novel, Kindred, is a postmodern slave narrative that redefines the previous literary constructions of slavery in the United States. Through its rejection of the nineteenth century slave narrative and sentimental novel, Kindred highlights the main problem with nineteenth century narrative empathy: Forging an intimate identification between reader and character to enact empathy is founded through the representation of bodies in pain. In place of this identification tactic, Kindred reveals a new critical apparatus, essential for a mobilization of empathy centered on understanding both history and the process of historical recuperation. This investigation of empathy sheds light on the problematic construction of the early liberal human rights model across the Americas, a model centered on promoting identification with the suffering other.

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Notes

1. I am indebted to Samuel Moyn's discussion (2014b) of the utopian dimension of the rights of man and of human rights in his groundbreaking book, The Last Utopia. Moyn suggests that the rights of man were inherently utopic, based on universal conceptions of man that predated the nation-state. What nineteenth century-rights constructions founded was the construction of the citizen, not the human.

2. Hartman explains: “[S]ince the veracity of black testimony is in doubt, the crimes of slavery must not only be confirmed by unquestionable authorities and other white observers but also must be made visible, whether by revealing the scarred back of the slave—in short, making the body speak—or through authenticating devices, or better yet, by enabling reader and audience member to experience vicariously the ‘tragical scenes of cruelty’” (1997: 22).

3. Hunt states that “Empathy depends on identification” (2008: 55).

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Notes on contributors

Irina Popescu

Irina Popescu received her Bachelor's Degree in English from the University of Texas at Austin and her Master's Degree in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the intersection of empathy, literature, history, and human rights.