Empathic economies

performance by refugees and asylum seekers

pp. 161-190

in: Lindsay B. Cummings, Empathy as dialogue in theatre and performance, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

In the previous chapter, I explored the empathic labor of acting, arguing that this labor is both frightening and pleasurable because through it we experience other ways of being in the world. I advocated, further, for a recognition of theatrical labor that often goes unmarked. If, as Erin Hurley argues, ""feeling-labour"… is the most important aspect of theatre's cultural work," then it is vital to acknowledge who performs that labor, under what circumstances, and for what forms of compensation. In this chapter, I expand on the feeling labor of performance, of which empathy, as both a cognitive and an affective process, is a part. As I have argued throughout this book, empathic labor is not (or should not be) simply the purview of those secure in their subject positions—the comfortable engagement of majority subjects with minority ones. Empathy is most effective at fostering greater understanding when it involves an equal exchange between all parties involved. Of course, our ability to meet one another as equals—in the space of performance or elsewhere—is always complicated by a host of factors. When empathy is imagined as a one-sided affair, the one who empathizes is generally understood to hold the position of privilege and power, but this assumption overlooks the fact that, frequently, minority subjects must engage in empathy as part of the process of interpreting and negotiating the worldview of the majority. For them, empathizing with majority culture is not an act of privilege, but may rather be one of survival, while eliciting the empathy of that culture means making oneself legible to those in power.