Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Empathy Behind and Beyond the Cage

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Navigating War, Dissent and Empathy in Arab/U.S Relations

  • 124 Accesses

Abstract

This chapter, ‘Empathy Behind and Beyond the Cage’, presents a very important though overlooked case in the War on Terror in Iraq; the tragedy witnessed by and involving an intelligence officer of the 101st Airborne unit in Iraq, Alyssa Peterson. Peterson was troubled by what she witnessed of interrogation methods meted out to Iraqi prisoners in a unit named ‘The Cage’. The chapter delineates formations and consequences of attitudes towards distant, orientalised enemy ‘others’. Reliant on the testimony of colleague, Kayla Williams, the chapter seeks to make sense of binaries between torturer and prisoner and ways in which empathic outlooks towards the distressed can open new spaces of building empathy. The second section of the chapter is a symptomatic interpretation of Peter Sattler’s American independent drama film Camp X-Ray (2014) analysing the film’s formalist and exponential elements which draw on empathic imagery in light of American and Arab identities.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 59.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD 79.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Brenner, R.F. 1997. Writing as Resistance: Four Women Confronting the Holocaust - Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne Frank, Etty Hillesum. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Burke, Kenneth. 1969. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Butler, J. 2006. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Batson, C.D. 1987. Prosocial Motivation: Is It Ever Truly Altruistic? In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 20, ed. L. Berkowitz, 65–122. New York: Academic Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cao, Xiaoxia. 2010. Pathways to Eliciting Aid: The Effects of Visual Representations of Human Suffering on Empathy and Help for People in Need. Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cusac, A.-M. 2011. Torture Is American. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/torture-is-american_b_733428.

  • Featherstone, M. 1990. Global Culture: An Introduction. In Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, ed. M. Featherstone. London: Sage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fairbairn, G.J. 2017. Reflecting on Empathy. In Exploring Empathy: Its Propagations, Perimeters and Potentialities, ed. Rebeccah Nelems and Nic Theo, 61–83. Leiden: Brill.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fanon, F. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. C. Farrington. New York: Grove Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Frankl, V.E. 2006. Man’s Search For Meaning. Boston: Beacon Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hallie, P.P. 1979. Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There). New York: HarperCollins.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hartman, S.V. 1997. Scenes of Subjection TERROR, SL.AVERY, AND SELF-MAKING IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hatfield, Elaine, John T. Cacioppo, and Richard L. Rapson. 1994. Emotional Contagion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Howard, A.L. 2014. ELICITATION OF EMPATHIC EMOTIONS USING FILM: DEVELOPMENT OF A STIMULUS SET BY THESIS. Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

    Google Scholar 

  • Izard, C.E., F.E. Dougherty, B.M. Bloxom, and W.E. Kotsch. 1974. The Differential Emotions Scale: A Method of Measuring the Subjective Experience of Discrete Emotions. Unpublished manuscript, Vanderbilt University.

    Google Scholar 

  • Keith, M., and S. Pile (eds.). 1993. Place and the Politics of Identity. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Landsberg, A. 2004. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of the Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Leake, E. 2014. Humanizing the Inhuman: The Value of Difficult Empathy. In Rethinking Empathy through Literature, ed. Meghan Marie Hammond and Sue J. Kim, 173–185. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Malatesta, C.Z., C. Culver, J.R. Tesman, and B. Shepard. 1989. The Development of Emotion Expression During the First Two Years of Life. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 54 (1–2): 1–104.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mitchell, G. 2008. So Wrong For So Long: How the Press, the Pundits – And the President failed on Iraq. New York: Union Square Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Oatley, K. 2009. An Emotion’s Emergence, Unfolding, and Potential for Empathy: A Study of Resentment by the “Psychologist of Avon”. Emotion Review 1 (1): 24–30.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Podsakoff, Philip M., and Dennis Organ. 1986. Self-Report in Organizational Research. Journal of Management 12: 531–544.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Puar, J.K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Rottenberg, J., R.D. Ray, and J.J. Gross. 2007. Emotion Elicitation Using Films. Handbook of Emotion Elicitation and Assessment. New York, USA: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Scheler, M. 2008 [1913/1923]. The Nature of Sympathy. London: Transaction.

    Google Scholar 

  • Srikanth, R. 2012. Constructing the Enemy: Empathy/Antipathy in U.S. Literature and Law. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stotland, E., and K.D. Smith. 1994. Empathy, Imagining and Motivation. Imagination, Cognition and Personality 13 (3): 193–213.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Suleiman, S. 2012. Performing a Perpetrator as Witness: Jonathan Littells’s Les Bienveillantes. In After Testimony. The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future, ed. Jakob Lothe, Susan Rubin Suleiman, and James Phelan, 99–119. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tudor, K. 2011. Understanding Empathy. Transactional Analysis Journal 41 (1): 39–57.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vaughan, K.B., and J.T. Lanzetta. 1980. Vicarious Instigation and Conditioning of Facial Expressive and Autonomic Responses to a Model’s Expressive Display of Pain. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 38 (6): 909–923.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vetlesen, A.J. 1994. Perception, Empathy, and Judgment: An Inquiry into the Preconditions of Moral Performance. Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Westermann, R., K. Spies, G. Stahl, and F.W. Hesse. 1996. Relative Effectiveness and Validity of Mood Induction Procedures: A Meta-analysis. European Journal of Social Psychology 26: 557–580.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Williams, K. 2006. Love My Rifle More Than You. New York: W.W. Norton.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wispé, L. 1991. Perspectives in Social Psychology. The Psychology of Sympathy. New York: Plenum Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Wolters, W. 2004. Without Sanctuary: Bearing Witness, Bearing Whiteness. JAC 24 (2): 399–425.

    Google Scholar 

  • Yamada, M. 1998. To the Lady. https://tableau.uchicago.edu/articles/2017/05/poetry-mitsuye-yamada.

  • Zillmann, D. 2006. Empathy: Affective Reactivity to Others’ Emotional Experiences. In Psychology of Entertainment, ed. J. Bryant and P. Vorderer, 151–181. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Royal Holloway University of London, Egham Hill, Egham, UK

    Osman Latiff

Authors
  1. Osman Latiff
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Osman Latiff .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Latiff, O. (2021). Empathy Behind and Beyond the Cage. In: Navigating War, Dissent and Empathy in Arab/U.S Relations. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76747-1_5

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76747-1_5

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-76746-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-76747-1

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation