60

Poet, playwright, flamenco expert, and literature professor, José Heredia Maya (1947-2010) was Spain’s first Roma university lecturer. In his texts published in the journal he was editor of, La mirada limpia y la existencia del otro (2001-2004), and in his book Literatura y antropología (2004), Heredia developed a taxonomy of the different ways of looking at the other in literature—the clean gaze (one without prejudices), the conscious gaze (resulting from an attentive effort and historical memory), the cloudy gaze (which reproduces social fears and stereotypes), and the dirty gaze (contaminated with hatred toward Muslims, Jews, and Roma). This article lays bare the reasons why Heredia’s theories have a crucial role in the defense—from the fields of philosophy (J. C. Mèlich), the study of literature as moral imagination, and cognitive psychology (K. Oatley)—of the connection between literature and social empathy.