4 - The Challenges of Cosmopolitan Thinking in a Postapartheid Society

Summary

In chapter 1, I argued that Mandela initiated a different kind of cosmopolitanism that is rooted in empathy (co-feeling), rather than in pure reason. He is not the only one to recognize the importance of co-feeling in South Africa. In this chapter, I focus on how Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee appeal to empathy as an essential element of open society.

Empathy has not been accorded its deserved attention in literary and cultural studies until the recent renewed interest in affect theory. The absence of empathy in academic and political discourses is due, in large part, to the influence of the Euro-modernist tradition that privileged reason over feeling, dismissing feeling as ephemeral. Given the condition of our world as a globalized space in which people from different backgrounds and ethnicities live together, it has become increasingly obvious that reason alone cannot account for mutual understanding and conviviality between people.

Without being able to put oneself in the position of others, one might not be able to appreciate their worldview, much less participate in their world. I understand “co-feeling” as a concept that captures not only the affinity between one person and another, but also all forms of solidarity and human rights. In Inventing Human Rights, Lynn Hunt argues that narratives of co-feeling have played a pivotal role in the conception of human rights. For example, the novels of eighteenth-century Europe provoked a “torrent of emotions” in their readers because of the way in which they shed light on the suffering of their protagonists. Hunt suggests that Jean-Jacques Rousseau's novel, Julie or the New Heloise, and others such as Richardson's Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747–48) contributed to the ideals in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, a document that served as the cornerstone of the French Revolution and presaged the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

What Hunt has said of these eighteenth-century authors applies equally to Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee in terms of their conception of openness to others and respect for others’ rights. As Nobel Prize–winning authors, Gordimer and Coetzee are recognized for their deep insights into the human condition and the far-reaching cosmopolitan range of those insights.