Empathy, it would seem, has become a Euro-American political obsession. Within contemporary liberal political imaginaries - from Obama’s political rhetoric, to international development discourse, to particular strands of feminist and anti-racist theory and praxis - empathy has been conceptualised as an affective capacity or technique via which ‘we’ can come to know the cultural ‘other’. Through transporting one into the affective world of another, it is argued, empathic perspective-taking can promote cross-cultural dialogue and understanding that leads to political action in the interests of transnational social justice.

Yet for empathy to do its important cross-cultural and transnational work, these discourses suggest, it must be accurate. A key imperative in this respect is that genuine empathy involves understanding ‘the other’ accurately from the perspective and context of the other, rather than projecting one’s own perspective and context. As such, liberal (and neoliberal) discourses maintain, ‘we’ must become skilled in reading others’ culturally specific mental and emotional states, as well as the intricacies of their social predicaments. (There are, as ever, critical questions to ask concerning who ‘we’ and ‘the other’ are within ubiquitous calls for transnational empathy as affective panacea).