To question the work of empathy, or, rather, what work empathy does in making sense of aesthetic forms and ways of life, is to wrest to the surface of sentimental rhetoric that which would implicate us not merely to each other’s pain, but to each other’s survival.
As patria ultimately derives from pater (‘father’), ‘repatriation’ shares a common root with other terms connoting national, familial, and social structures, such as patriotism, patriarch, patrimony, compatriot, and more.
By starting with “placing care around” the recipient, the viewer, the audience member, the community member, and others scholars can minimize and potentially prevent re-traumatization in the discussion of difficult histories.
Might Melanie Klein's notion of envy offer a productive way to theorize modern debates about reparations? Could a similar kind of envy be operating within oppositional voices that resist the notion of repair in all its forms?
Camille Turner's performance posits thinking with the non-human and time-travelling as interconnected strategies for return/repair.
The concept of narrative is significant in its relationship to the roles that Indigenous communities have been positioned in within the broader history of visual culture.