Aruna D’Souza: Imperfect Solidarities

Book launch and conversation at Printed Matter Chelsea
July 17, 2024
6–8PM


Join us at Printed Matter Chelsea for an evening with Aruna D’Souza, exploring her new book project Imperfect Solidarities from Floating Opera Press. D’Souza will be joined in conversation by writer and curator Jasmine Wahi to explore the themes of the text.

Can empathy deliver political change? Does art that elicits emotional identification with others take us where we need to go? In Imperfect Solidarities, writer and art historian Aruna D'Souza offers observations pulled from current events as well as contemporary art that suggest that a feeling of understanding or closeness based on emotion is an imperfect ground for solidarity. Empathy—and its correlate, love—is a distraction from the hard work that needs to be done to achieve justice. Rather, D'Souza contends, we need to imagine a form of political solidarity that is not based on empathy, but on the much more difficult obligation of care. When we can respect the unknowability of the other and still care for and with them, without translating ourselves into their terms, perhaps we will fare better at building political bridges.

Aruna D’Souza is a writer and critic based in New York. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times and 4Columns.org, where she is a member of the editorial advisory board. Her writing has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Bookforum, Frieze, Momus, and Art in America, among other places. Her book, Whitewalling: Art, Race, and Protest in 3 Acts (Badlands Unlimited), was named one of the best art books of 2018 by The New York Times. She is the recipient of the 2021 Rabkin Prize for art journalism and a 2019 Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers.

Jasmine Wahi is the Co-Director of Project for Empty Space, a nonprofit organization in New York City and Newark, New Jersey. Her curatorial practice predominantly focuses on femme empowerment, complicating binary structures, and exploring liberatory strategies through the lens of intersectional feminism. She is the recipient of the 2023 Women’s History Month Award from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is also a TEDx speaker, her 2019 talk (titled after Nadiyya Waheed’s poem) is All The Women In Me Are Tired.

/