The role of empathy in bridging Western and Indigenous knowledges: Dominick LaCapra and Ailton Krenak

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article rethinks the problems of empathy in historical theory in the context of current discussions about environmental problems, relations between humans and nonhumans as well as Western and Indigenous knowledges. The category of ‘empathic unsettlement’, coined by the theorist of history Dominick LaCapra, is presented to address the role of empathy as a way to know, engage and narrate the experience of historical subjects in the past. In this article, I analyse and expand the understanding of empathy in dialogue with reflections by the Indigenous activist and intellectual, Ailton Krenak. The purpose of this article is not to review the literature on the topic of empathy or to bring comparative analyses from the reflections of LaCapra and Krenak. Rather, their works serve as a platform that creates space for discussing the notion of empathy as a bridging concept that helps to develop a complementary and collaborative approach between Western and Indigenous knowledges. I claim that the role of empathy is to recognize other ontologies, epistemologies, and cosmologies, and to ‘make time to tell new stories’ that would contribute to building sustainable knowledge.