ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the treatment of dance as a modality that, by prompting kinesthetic empathy, destabilizes cultural identities in contemporary Anglophone fictions, such as, Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (2016) and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body (2018). Aesthetic activities have played a vital role in the history of ideas about emotions. Kinesthetic empathy, Susan Lanzoni notes, developed as a concept in early twentieth-century dance criticism to refer to “the audience’s ability to feel into and grasp the new abstract forms of modern dance.” Empathy meant the embodied perception of forms rather than an attitude toward persons in this framework. Contemporary cognitive philosophy, though, associates empathy with sharing and identification among human subjects. Dance, the art of movement in time, offers novelists like Smith and Dangarembga both a generative analogue for refiguring identities and reimagining feelings of similarity and difference. Combining insights from dance research, narrative and cognitive cultural studies, this chapter charts how dance sets in motion an ethical-formal inquiry into empathy in Swing Time and This Mournable Body.
