Introduction: Amy Williamsen and the Call to Empathetic Action

Abstract

Introduction:Amy Williamsen and the Call to Empathetic Action Bradley J. Nelson (bio) Amy Williamsen was a scholar and, more importantly, a dear friend of rare and forward-looking intellectual insight, deep empathy for her fellow human beings, and infinite generosity in her academic, professional, and personal commitments. Tragically, her voice is missing from this special cluster on science fiction and Cervantes dedicated to her scholarship and her impact on Cervantes studies and Hispanism more broadly. As the authors of this Cervantes number well know, Amy was my co-editor for this endeavor, which began with our preliminary conversations under the midnight sun at the 2017 conference Cervantes en el Septentrión, held in Trømso, Norway. Her absence from the pleasant task of editing this outstanding collection of essays has made sitting down to write the introduction a melancholic exercise—and much less interesting—as what was envisioned as a dialogical banter has become, both fittingly and disturbingly given the timing, somewhat of a journey within my own intellectual echo chamber. Like many of our readers, I have been working from home for the last ten months with no end in sight. Luckily, where Cervantes had to resort to the invention of a fictional friend to guide his authorial avatar in bringing the prologue of Don Quixote to fruition, Amy is still here, in her writings and in the neural pathways in my brain that animate her voice when I reconstruct my memories of her—even more so when I ponder the reasons that brought us together around this enterprise, which in a nutshell would be our mutual interest in science, science fiction, sex-gender studies, and of course Cervantes. In [End Page 15] Trømso, another motivation for this project was the urgency we both felt concerning the regrettable state of political and public discourse around issues of equity, diversity, gun violence…basically, the safety and well-being of our students and fellow global citizens under a political and economic regime that works tirelessly to divide people, both overtly through the extremist and hate-filled rhetorics of gaslighting, victim blaming, race baiting, and anti-scientific/anti-intellectual magical thinking; and tactily by furthering the neoliberal consolidation of wealth and power by ever fewer and less identifiable hands deploying the very tools and institutions that are supposed to constitute and safeguard our democracies (see especially Naomi Klein's and Jane Mayer's work). This state of affairs has intensified and expanded almost beyond comprehension during the current global pandemic, which has had the most deleterious effects on the poorest and most excluded sectors of the population, even while movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo have expanded and begun to consolidate their gains in popular influence through sporadic if notable institutional transformations. Even those of us who have been using apocalyptic and dystopian sci-fi productions—such as Lars von Trier's Melancholia or Ridley Scott's Bladerunner and Denis Villeneuve's Bladerunner 2049—to dialogue with Cervantes's darkly ironic framings of Spanish Counter Reformation manifestations of delusional political spectacles, equally delusional identitary narcissisms, sexual violence, economic misery, etc., can't help but be dismayed and even shocked by the figural and literal conflagrations scorching the political and geographical landscape of the US.1 Von Trier's Melancholia follows a well-off family's struggles with mental illness and failed domestic relationships as a rogue planet bears down on Earth.2 The collision between blindly vain attempts to psychologically fend off total annihilation, clinical depression brought [End Page 16] on by a character's impotence to change her condition, and the chaos that this same impotence and depression bring to even a wealthy family lead the main characters to erect a "magic tent" out of sticks and blankets as Melancholia slams into the Earth. It is a strong if nihilistic indictment of the state of political action where climate change and any number of other scientifically-validated maladies facing the human species in 2021, from sexual violence to systemic racism and political corruption, are concerned. Amy's 2011 essay "Quantum Quixote: Embodying Empathy in the Borderlands" was motivated in part by an analogous exasperation at the...