Amanda Rogers reviews Carolyn Pedwell’s book Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (Palgrave Macmillan 2014) at the Society and Space open site.

Pedwell’s rich study examines the diverse ways in which empathy is mobilised – from political speeches that uphold neoliberalism, to postcolonial literatures that refuse certain forms of empathic connection. Empathy is an affective relation often conceptualized in liberal and neoliberal thought as the imaginative and felt ability to “put oneself in the other’s shoes”. In challenging the appropriative dynamics of this mode of perspective taking, alongside its assumptions of universality, Affective Relations underscores the multiple configurations of empathy across different contexts.

Continue reading the review here.