How Postcolonial Texts Solve the Problem of Empathy in World Literature

Abstract Various critics have derided the idea that fiction develops readers’ capacity for empathy. Instead, they argue that the emotion privileges the pain of near, visible and familiar humans over that of others, and is linked to a cathartic release that is unconnected to any moral action. As an alternative, Namwali Serpell points to Hannah Arendt’s idea of “representative thinking,” which, instead of virtually becoming another or feeling what they are feeling, asks you to imagine what it is like to be them, thereby using your own mind but from their position, or “training one’s imagination to go visiting.” As Serpell explains it, representative thinking is a form of “perspective taking” that seeks emotional understanding rather than emotional union. In this paper, I will explore what kinds of literary fictions, and what kinds of tools within them, lend themselves to such a practice, and what kinds do not. I ask this question in relation to the institution of world literature, which too often commodifies the pain of the “other” as entertainment, under the guise of empathy. Reading NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names alongside Achebe’s Things Fall Apart , I ask: What makes a world literature text more likely to produce empathy as representative thinking instead of empathy as simplistic othering, or self-serving catharsis? And how does acknowledging these differences change how we define world literature?