Within the broad Freirean paradigm that dominates critical pedagogy, there is a tendency to assume that affects such as love, hope, and empathy as well as revolutionary agency are naturally occurring in all human beings and that conscientization will eventually lead to empowerment for change (Amsler 2011). However, it is not clear how the workings of empathy in critical pedagogy might be conceptualized, when relations of coloniality are placed in the foreground. In which ways does the pursuit of critical consciousness through empathy map onto colonial histories and conditions? In accounts of cultivating critical consciousness, who is being moved, affected, or transformed through empathy and who is fixed in place (cf. Pedwell 2012a)? This article agrees with critiques suggesting that decolonization may not be always compatible to Freirean theory and critical pedagogy, yet it suggests that critical pedagogy can be reinvented as "decolonizing pedagogy"; to show this, the analysis focuses on the workings of empathy. To develop this argument, the article is divided into four sections. The first section revisits briefly the critiques of Freirean theory and critical pedagogy, especially from the viewpoint of scholars who write from decolonial perspectives. The second section discusses the centrality of affect in critical pedagogy and highlights how recent scholarly engagements with affect and emotion, and particularly writing on the role of empathy, have offered a compelling vocabulary for cultivating self and social transformation. The third section takes up Carolyn Pedwell's recent analysis on the complex links between empathy and transnational relations of power--for example, colonialism, slavery, diaspora, migration, globalization, and neoliberalism among other phenomena--and considers what it might mean to "decolonize" empathy in critical, feminist, and anti-racist theories. The last section focuses more explicitly on the meanings and implications of critical pedagogy as a decolonizing pedagogy of empathy.