The Brooklyn Rail

In September 1980, artists Ana Mendieta, Kazuko Miyamoto, and Zarina Hashmi curated the exhibition Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women at the Brooklyn-based feminist cooperative A.I.R. Gallery. The exhibition tested the limits of artistic solidarity. Rather than centering on a medium or style, its organizing principle was to showcase work by artists who occupied identities outside the reductive dualities of male and female, Black and white, and thus faced related challenges of access and visibility. Noting the exhibition’s aesthetic variability, otherwise sympathetic critics questioned its coherence. In her new book, Imperfect Solidarities, Aruna D’Souza returns to Dialectics of Isolation and the critical conversations it sparked. The provocative book broadens the incisive analysis that has made D’Souza an essential critic of contemporary art. Like Mendieta, Miyamoto, and Hashmi, D’Souza’s primary aims are to demonstrate the political viability of caring across differences and to advocate for the urgency of coalitional solidarity.

Imperfect Solidarities centers on a hopeful, if daunting, question: “What would it mean if our politics were based not on our ability to empathize with people whose experiences are distant from our own, but on our willingness to care for others just by virtue of their being beings?” D’Souza explores its implications through concise readings of a range of work, including Dialectics of Isolation, as well as Amitav Ghosh’s novel Sea of Poppies, Candice Breitz’s seven-channel video Love Story, and Stephanie Syjuco’s photographic project Block Out the Sun, among others. D’Souza’s absorbing descriptions of these works draw attention to relationships among their animating ideas. Cumulatively, the book demonstrates the unreasonable burden the logics of coherence and empathy place on victims of injustice to perform their suffering to garner attention and “change hearts and minds.”

By prioritizing feelings ahead of actions, D’Souza argues, empathy reinforces existing hierarchies and subordinates the “real conditions being experienced by people” to the “emotional response of those doing the witnessing.” Syjuco’s Block Out the Sun intervenes directly in these distorting pressures. The project consists of an archive of photographs of Filipino people brought to St. Louis, Missouri for the 1904 World’s Fair to show American audiences their traditional ways of life. Syjuco created new versions of the photographs by obscuring their subjects’ faces with her hands. D’Souza describes the artist’s intervention as a “protective gesture” that restored a “belated right to opacity that colonialism stripped away.” Theorized by Caribbean poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, opacity is a refusal to submit to external ways of knowing, especially demands for transparency and coherence imposed by Western culture. D’Souza argues that opacity is a “fundamental prerequisite to equality” that requires us to “cede our demands” that the people we would act in solidarity with “make themselves completely known to us” to merit our commitment to justice.

D’Souza’s analysis of aesthetic opacity reinforces an argument she introduced in Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts: artistic empathy often relies on white supremacist conceptions of identity. She cites Breitz’s Love Story in Imperfect Solidarities as a further demonstration of this argument. The work pairs videos of migrants and refugees telling their stories with videos of white actors Julianne Moore and Alec Baldwin reciting the same stories. D’Souza argues that online and social media culture prime audiences to respond more empathetically to the actors’ versions. We value stories more when we hear them from people we recognize, whether they are celebrities or merely because they look like us. This “whitewashing” effect, as D’Souza terms it, reduces suffering to emotional spectacle and “allows us to avoid the hard work of facing our biggest problems.” It deflects our responsibility to care for one another “by having us turn inward, into the ego-driven space of emotion.”

D’Souza’s critique of empathy recalls philosopher Stanley Cavell’s theory of acknowledgment. Both thinkers observe that mutual understanding is impossible. We cannot feel exactly what another person feels because we can only experience the world as ourselves. For Cavell, acknowledging others means recognizing that their experiences are just as opaque to us as ours are to them. Once we acknowledge others’ experiences, we can respond by caring for them or refusing to engage. D’Souza emphasizes the harms that follow from refusal and asserts a normative political claim modeled on the intersectional solidarity embedded in Mendieta, Miyamoto, and Hashmi’s curatorial vision. Defining care as “the most basic obligation we have toward each other,” she urges readers to “place the cause of justice ahead of our own feelings.”

If artworks can show us what is at stake in respecting opacity and choosing to care, they leave us with work to do. The destructive violence underway in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, and elsewhere around the world demands acknowledgment. Imperfect Solidarities makes clear that whether we understand the causes or recognize ourselves among the victims has no bearing on responsibility to respond to suffering. As D’Souza concludes, “care is infinitely harder than love” because it requires us to commit to the “dialectical and productive potential” of solidarity and focus our energy on “what needs to be done.”