Imperfect Solidarities - (Critics' Essay) by Aruna D'Souza (Paperback)

About the Book

Aruna D'Souza draws from current events and contemporary art to suggest that a feeling of understanding or closeness based on emotional attachment fails to generate solidarity.

Book Synopsis

Can empathy deliver political change? Does art that elicits emotional identification with others take us where we need to go? In Imperfect Solidarities, writer and art historian Aruna D'Souza offers observations pulled from current events as well as contemporary art that suggest that a feeling of understanding or closeness based on emotion is an imperfect ground for solidarity. Empathy--and its correlate, love--is a distraction from the hard work that needs to be done to achieve justice. Rather, D'Souza contends, we need to imagine a form of political solidarity that is not based on empathy, but on the much more difficult obligation of care. When we can respect the unknowability of the other and still care for and with them, without translating ourselves into their terms, perhaps we will fare better at building political bridges.

Review Quotes

D'Souza's analysis invites us to question how empathy and the desire for solidarity, while often serving as a unifying force, can sometimes be limited to building superficial coalitions--the so-called "big tent mentality." This approach promotes the idea of ​​a broad coalition while maintaining the very power dynamics it superficially claims to challenge.--Elide Vincenti "Public Seminar"

[This] provocative book broadens the incisive analysis that has made D'Souza an essential critic of contemporary art.--Nate Mickelson "Brooklyn Rail"

D'Souza echoes Édouard Glissant's edict that the global majority must assert the "right to opacity," . . . In retaining this opacity, D'Souza shows how the artist found a way not to "retreat into silence or disengagement, without being caught up in, or grasped by, a language he had never agreed to speak." These curatorial and artistic gestures, like "Stick of Gum" and "Next 2 U," imagine ways of coming together which refuse to translate, reduce, or demand coherence of one another.--Georgia Phillips-Amos "Public Parking"

[D'Souza's] unique contribution is instead thinking through the role of art in helping to produce a shift. Drawing on works spanning from the novelist Amitav Ghosh to artists Candice Breitz, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Stephanie Syjuco, she shows how, contrary to old liberal pieties, artworks can deflect empathy.--Alisa Solomon "Jewish Currents"

In this succinct and urgent treatise, [D'souza] argues for an approach to the 'pain of others' that transcends empathy and identification.--Candice Breitz

In its concision and power--nearly every sentence is a banger--Larissa Pham "artnews.com"

About the Author

Aruna D'Souza is a writer and critic based in New York. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times and 4Columns.org, where she is a member of the editorial advisory board. Her writing has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, CNN.com, Bookforum, Frieze, Momus, and Art in America, among other places. Her book, Whitewalling: Art, Race, and Protest in 3 Acts (Badlands Unlimited), was named one of the best art books of 2018 by the New York Times. She is the recipient of the 2021 Rabkin Prize for art journalism and a 2019 Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant.