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The scholarship of suffering is in a Eurocentric bind – with the West as the possessor of the humanitarian gaze and the East/Global South as the recipient of this politics of pity (see Boltanski 1999, Hoijer 2004, Chouliaraki 2006). The panacea to eradicate the lack of compassion or pity is the enactment of cosmopolitan communities filled with diversity, so that the suffering “Other” is not a remote fantasy figure but made familiar through this idealized inclusive community. Hence, this Other is us. Suffering can also produce fetishized consumer communities which buy into the solidarity of the moment without engaging with the politics of pity (Chouliaraki 2013). Scholarship on the subject of suffering located through its vantage point of the West consuming the East or the Global South has cast itself into a binary of power relations through the construction of abjection and pity, elongating the tropes of Orientalism. Embracing the idea of suffering through media platforms, media representations and media texts, the notion of “mediated suffering” premises a process of communication (including an emotive and cognitive immersion into a constructed environment but equally a degree of removal) where technology and content reconfigure distance, proximity, morality and notions of humanity in this realm of scholarship. Premising suffering through the media event and not what preceded before or followed after, suffering scholarship retains media spectacle as its vantage point for studying audience compassion for the unknown Other and its victimhood, dictating a “proper distance” (Silverstone 2006) to enable a viable and humanitarian response to the Other in crisis. The dichotomization of the West and the rest (i.e. read through its alterity) becomes an underpinning paradigm in these discussions without a deconstruction of the trajectory of humanitarian discourses which have originated from unequal power relations and domination. This occurred particularly through colonization, the hegemony of Western power relations and ideology after World War II, the hand of forceful capitalism and neoliberalism in opening up markets under the guise of globalization, and the formation of the Global South as a label of social and economic depravity. The scholarship of suffering hinges its analysis through the act of watching or through the broader ambit of consumption. The consumers become audiences of a screen culture and its attendant subjectivities, mediated both through technological manipulation and the modes of representation. Some of the literature on suffering encodes these audiences as “witnesses” to the events which unfold on the media(ted) stage (see Ibrahim 2010a). Suffering then appropriates a cartography where the theater of suffering is projected onto the East or Global South through the act of watching, through replay, through freeze-frames which catapult suffering into its own representational hegemonies and aesthetic modes in our technological world. The ability to feel compassion and pity, coalesce with a Western geopolitics of power such that the ability to feel pity becomes the resting site of the Western gaze and its sociological imagination of the distant Other as the lesser human, continuously impoverished through her vulnerabilities and suffering. Such an imagination is persistent in the construction of the African continent conceived through famine and genocide, and equally in fiction and popular culture, where the continent is produced The East as a Theatre House of Suffering: ‘Suffering’ Scholarship and the Orientalist Bind