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The Future of Human Rights: U.S. Policy for a New Era (review)

empathy”10. A recent editorial by Daniel Mendelsohn reminds us of the dangers inherent in attempting such emotional connections: “The facile assumption that we can literally ‘feel others’ pain’ can be dangerous to our sense of who we are—and, more alarmingly, who the others are, too. . . . [I]t’s useful to remember that identity is precisely that quality in a person, or group, that cannot be appropriate by others.”11 Recent theatre and performance scholars have begun to test the limits of empathy and to question its efficacy regarding artistic engagements with genocide and its aftermath. At a recent meeting of theatre historians, Patrick Anderson rejected the uncritical reliance on what he terms the “late-modern” empathic exchange in theatrical representation and intercultural dialogue, proposing in its stead Samuel Beckett’s theatre as an ethical model for “bearing witness” to the impossible task of representing trauma.12 And while The Theatre of Genocide benefits from extremely thoughtful editing, Skloot’s claim that the four playwrights anthologized have “no colonial complicity” but “only their human connections to the stories they dramatize” approaches oversimplifying today’s complex global network of human relations. As East African theatre scholar Laura Edmondson recently asked her fellow US theatre and performance scholars, “When is the promise of transformation used as a theoretical salve for our unease about an unjust and genocidal planet where our economic privilege and material comfort depend upon a harsh world order that consigns millions of human beings to squalor and despair?”13 Of this volume’s four estimable contributions to a growing canon, it is Ehn’s Maria Kizito that cautions us to be, in Edmondson’s words, “fully attentive to [the] ambiguities, dangers, and gifts” of theatre’s complexity, as it suggests new theatrical paths for engaging with the incomprehensible.14