Introduction: Narrative Empathy And The Ethics Of Border-Crossing In World Literature

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-3-2025

Published In

Journal Of World Literature

Abstract

The special issue Constructing the Other: Narrative Empathy and the Ethics of Border-Crossing in World Literature intervenes in the current scholarship on narrative empathy in two specific ways: first, by contesting the mainstream position that empathy is exclusively colonial or ethnocentric, our collection asserts that empathy can play a positive role in shaping anticolonial resistance, global south solidarities, and collective efforts against oppression; second, by offering visibility to narrative strategies and aesthetic modes of empathy practiced globally by creative writers to ethically rethink otherness and alterity in literature. Some of the concerns highlighted in the different chapters include how do creative writers deploy narrative strategies to ethically imagine otherness and border-crossing? How can border-crossing empathy allow us to dismantle colonial, hegemonic, and other forms of representational violence? How can narrative empathy allow us to move beyond anthropocentric limitations in imagining non-human planetary consciousness? How can writers encounter their own prejudices in crafting ethical and empathetic border-crossing strategies? How can the teaching of empathy enrich student encounters with narratives of difference? How can empathy produce new forms of ethicality and inter-subjective alliance in war-torn and conflicted regions? Are there particular literary tools and strategies that can be consistently identified across different texts as a vehicle for empathy? And finally, how do writers and scholars engage empathy as a criterion for evaluating literature?

Keywords

empathy, border-crossing, other, world literature, Global South

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