Émile Zola’s Black Lives: colonial experiments and the limits of empathy

Journal article

Abstract:: Émile Zola's allusion to (fictional) colonial medical experimentation in La Joie de vivre requires us to reconsider the impact of racial and geographical distance on empathy. Cazenove, a doctor whose formative years were spent with the colonial navy, recalls his own experiments with vivisection on Black women, and trying out poisons on Asian subjects. Drawing on recent theoretical explorations of empathy by Carlo Ginzburg and Paul Bloom, this article argues that the novel shows us the limits of empathy. Zola explores suffering and ‘la bonté', responding to Schopenhauer's idealisation of empathy and Claude Bernard’s theories of experimental medicine.

Files:: Yee_2024_Emile__Zolas_Black.pdf

(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 1.4MB, Terms of use)

Publisher:: Taylor and Francis
Journal:: Dix-Neuf: New Directions in Nineteenth-Century French Studies More from this journal
Volume:: 28
Issue:: 1
Pages:: 32-46
Publication date:: 2022-07-25
Acceptance date:: 2022-06-02
DOI:: 10.1080/14787318.2022.2090093
EISSN:: 1478-7318

Language:: English
Keywords:: race

experimentation

ethics

empathy

colonialism

FFR

Emile Zola

naturalism
Pubs id:: 1262049
Local pid:: pubs:1262049
Deposit date:: 2022-06-03

Copyright holder:: Jennifer Yee
Rights statement:: © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record