The Echo of empathy in Nandipha Mntambo's "The Encounter"

Empathy is frequently deployed to mark a break with patterns of colonial violence, yet disavowed in the postcolonial injunction to empathize is that empathy also ordered forms of knowledge that rationalized colonial rule and conditioned the very violence empathy is thought to transcend. The contention here is that empathy cannot offer an exit to the script of colonialism unless the colonial histories out of which it was forged are recollected, the structure of the concept reworked. The paper attempts to think with, alongside, the installations and images of artist Nandipha Mntambo, where precisely such work has taken place.Ross Truscott holds a PhD from the University of Fort Hare, South Africa. Prior to coming to Duke he was a research fellow at the Center for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape.This lecture is part of the Psychoanalysis in an International Frame Series.