This set of text emerged from a conversation with Adonis (@mercurysymbol) concerning grief, experimental and rave music, and land. In assembling these texts, I’m interested in sharing authors concerned with the staging of empathy.

empathy is not given

we are not given to empathy

empathy is not a given

empathy is cultivated

like any skill

like any form of knowledge

empathy is hard won

These texts move through psychological, historical, and aesthetic underpinnings of empathy. Generally, the reading list moves through first a question of how empathy emerges and what historical conditions complicate empathy. Second, it situates empathy as an element with community formation, considering how communities emerging within settler colonial and racial capitalist contexts can extend empathy to those harmed by historical and present injustices. Finally, these texts consider the conflicts within empathy, the ways in which communities fail us, and artistic/philosophical project of living through these contradictions.

I have organized these texts as a syllabus with an intentional order. The readings are kept to be 50-75 pages a week to make it accessible for someone studying them on their own. I’d like to thank my professors Audra Simpson and Catherine Fennell for exposing me to many of these texts. If anyone pursues these readings and has any questions, feel free to email me.

Week 1

Judith Butler, Frames of War (“Introduction: Precarious Life” and “Grievable Life and Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect”)

Week 2

Sadiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother (“Prologue: The Path of Strangers”, “So Many Dungeons”, and “The Dead Book”)

Week 3

Hil Milatano, Trans Care

Week 4

Christina Sharpe, In the Wake (“The Wake”)

Week 5

Billy-Ray Belcourt, This Wound Is a World

Week 6

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation”

Joanne Barker, “Territory as Analytic: The Dispossession of Lenapehoking and the Subprime Crisis”

Week 7

Lauren Berland and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public”

Erin McElroy and Alex Werth, “Deracinated Dispossessions: On the Foreclosures of ‘Gentrification’ in Oakland, CA”

Week 8

Morgan Bassichis and Dean Space, “Queer politics and anti-blackness”

Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism (“‘Packing Guns Instead of Lunches’: Biopower and Juvenile Delinquency” including “Ripples in Time: An Update”)

Week 9

Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Aurality (“On Howls and Pitches”)

Sultana Isham, “Noise Is the N** of Sound” (suggested by Adonis)

Week 10

The Invisible Committee, Now (“Let’s Destitute the World”)

Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (“Thought and Life”, “Art”, and “New Image of Thought”)

Week 11

Theo Montoya, ANHELL69 (2022)

David Farrow, “Feeling Pain/Making Kin in the Brooklyn Noise Music Scene”