Empires of Vision edited by Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy

8/13/2019 Empires of Vision edited by Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy

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Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy, editors

Empires of Vision a reader


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Objects/Histories

Critical Perspectives on Art, Material Culture, and Representation

Published with the assistance o the Getty Foundation.


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Empires o Vision

Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy, editors

Durham and London 2014


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2014 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States o

America on acid-free paper

Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan

ypeset in Carter & Cone Galliard

by seng Information Systems, Inc.

Library o Congress Cataloging-

in Publication DataEmpires o vision : a reader / Martin Jay

and Sumathi Ramaswamy, eds.

pages cm (Objects/histories)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

978-0-8223-5436-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

978-0-8223-5448-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Imperialism. 2. Postcolonialism. 3. Visual

anthropology. I. Jay, Martin, 1944

II. Ramaswamy, Sumathi. III. Series:

Objects/histories.

359.4625 2014

325.3dc23 2013025462


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ix Illustrations

xi Reprint Acknowledgments

xv Acknowledgments

1 Introduction: Te Work o Vision in the Age

o European Empires, Sumathi Ramaswamy

Section I: Te Imperial Optic

Introduction,Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy 25

1:

47 1. Te Walls o Images, Serge Gruzinski

64 2. Painting as Exploration: Visualizing Nature

in Eighteenth-Century Colonial Science,Daniela Bleichmar

91 3. Indian Yellow: Making and Breaking the

Imperial Palette,Jordanna Bailkin

111 4. Colonial Panaromania,Roger Benjamin

2: -

141 5. Objects o Knowledge: Oceanic Artifacts

in European Engravings,Nicholas Tomas

159 6. Excess in the City? Te Consumption o Imported

Prints in Colonial Calcutta, c. 1780c. 1795,Natasha Eaton


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189 7. Advertising and the Optics o Colonial Power

at the Fin de Sicle,David Ciarlo

3: , , 211 8. Mapping Plus Ultra: Cartography, Space,

and Hispanic Modernity,Ricardo Padrn

246 9. Mapping an Exotic World: Te Global Project

o Dutch Cartography, circa 1700,Benjamin Schmidt

267 10. Visual Regimes o Colonization: European

and Aboriginal Seeing in Australia, erry Smith

4:

283 11. Te Photography Complex: Exposing Boxer-Era

China (19001901), Making Civilization,James L. Hevia

315 12. Colonial Teaters o Proof: Representation

and Laughter in 1930s Rockefeller Foundation Hygiene

Cinema in Java,Eric A. Stein

346 13. Colonialism and the Built Space o Cinema,

Brian Larkin

Section II: Postcolonial Looking

Introduction,Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy 377

5: :

395 14. Speaking Back to Orientalist Discourse,

Zeynep elik

415 15. Maps, Mother/Goddesses, and Martyrdom

in Modern India, Sumathi Ramaswamy

450 16. Notes from the Surface o the Image:

Photography, Postcolonialism, and Vernacular Modernism,

Christopher Pinney

471 17. I Am Rendered Speechless by Your Idea

o Beauty: Te Picturesque in History and Art in the

Postcolony,Krista A. Tompson


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503 18. Fanon, Algeria, and the Cinema:

Te Politics o Identification,Robert Stam

6:

539 19. Creole Europe: Te Reflection o a Reflection,

Christopher Pinney

566 20. Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata o Difference,

Simon Gikandi

594 21.Double Dutchand the Culture Game,Olu Oguibe

609 Conclusion: A Parting Glance: Empire and Visuality,

Martin Jay

621 Contributors

629 Index


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1.1 St. Gregorys Mass, Cholula Convent, Mexico City 58

2.12.4 Centropogon cornutus(Campanulaceae family) 78

2.52.8 Bomarea fondea(Amaryllidaceae family) 81

2.9 Gustavia augusta(Lecythidaceae family) 84

4.1 Louis inayre, Te Panorama o Madagascar(Panorama de Madagascar),

Paris, 1900 117

4.2 Moving Stereorama, orPome de la Mer, Palais des Attractions

algriennes, Paris, 1900 119

4.3 Javanese Dancers with Louis Dumoulins Painted View o Angkor Wat 121

5.1 Various Articles o Nootka Sound, Various Articles o the Sandwich

Islands 146

5.2 Te Landing at Middleburgh, One o the Friendly Isles 149

7.1 rademark registration for Kiautschau Cookies 194

7.2 Advertisement for Agfa photography materials 195

7.3 1912 trademark registration by Reinhold etzer for ink 199

7.4 1914 trademark registration by Fa. L Wolff for cigars 2018.1 MappaemundifromEtymologiao Saint Isidore o Seville 213

8.2 Mappaemundifrom PtolemysGeographia 214

8.3 Te Indies, the North Atlantic, and Western Europe from Pedro

de MedinasArte de navegar 234

8.4 Detail from planisphere, Diego Ribeiro 236

9.1 Jacob van Campen, riumph, with reasures o the Indies 255

9.2 Jan van Kessel,Americque 257

9.3 itle page illustration in Petrus Nylandt,Het schouw-toneel der aertscheschepselen 261


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x

10.1 Sketch o Sydney Cove, John Hunter and William Bradley 270

10.2 Francis Fowkes (attributed), Sketch and Description o the Settlement

at Sydney Cove 271

10.3 Clifford Possum japaltjarri, im Leura japaltjarri, Warlugulong 273

11.1 Mandarins in the Palace Court-yard 293

11.2 ommy Atkins at the center o the Chinese universe 303

11.3 Blurred photo o execution 307

11.4 Imperial Chinese soldiers 308

12.1 Kromo at the side o the road 324

12.2 Hygiene mantri in home visit with Kromo 325

12.3 Beore and Ater reatment 326

12.4 Gareng 3352.1 Yinka Shonibare, Scramble or Afica, 2003 377

14.1 Osman Hamdi, Girl Reading 400

14.2 Imperial Library, Istanbul 403

14.3 Eugne Delacroix,Les Femmes dAlger dans leur appartement 409

14.4 Pablo Picasso,Les Femmes dAlger 410

15.1 Shaheed Bhagat Singh(Martyr Bhagat Singh) 417

15.2 Bapuji Ki Amar Kahani(Gandhis Eternal Story) 418

15.3 When My Life Is Gone, Every Drop o My Blood Will Strengthen

the Nation 419

15.4 Lagaan(ax) 442

16.1 Composite print by Suhag Studios, Nagda 462

16.2 Seydou Keta, Untitled (reclining woman) 464

16.3 Seydou Keta, Untitled (man with paper flower) 465

17.117.2 City Pharmacy, Nassau, wo Natives, Nassau 477

17.3 Jacob Frank Coonley, On the Way to Market 47917.4 Cropped wo Natives postcard 487

17.5 H. G. Johnston [James Johnston], Te Morning oilet 496

19.1 Frontispiece to Philippus Baldaeus,A Description o the East India

Coasts o Malabar and Cormandel 541

20.1 Pablo Picasso,Academy Study o a Black Man 574

20.2 Pablo Picasso,Les Demoiselles DAvignon 577

20.3 Faith Ringgold, Te French Collection, Part I, #7,Picassos Studio 588

20.4 Leandro Mbomio Nsue,Mina ya Nnom 589


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Bailkin, Jordanna. Indian Yellow: Making and Breaking the Imperial Palette.Journal o Material Culture10(2) (2005): 197214, reprinted by permission o

Sage Publications.

Benjamin, Roger. Colonial Panaromania, excerpts from Orientalist Aesthetics:

Art, Colonialism, and French North Afica, 18801930, 10527, 29699. 2003

by the Regents o the University o California. Published by the University o

California Press.

Bleichmar, Daniela. Painting as Exploration: Visualizing Nature in Eighteenth-

Century Colonial Science. Colonial Latin American Review15(1) (2006):

81104, reprinted by permission o the publisher (aylor & Francis Ltd., www

.tandfonline.com).

elik, Zeynep. Speaking Back to Orientalist Discourse, in Orientalisms Inter-

locutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography, ed. J. Beaulieu and M. Roberts,

1942. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.

Ciarlo, David. Advertising and the Optics o Colonial Power at the Fin

de Sicle, in German Colonialism, Visual Culture and Modern Memory, ed.Volker M. Langbehn, 3754. London: Routledge, 2010. 2010 Routledge.

Reproduced by permission o aylor & Francis Books UK.

Eaton, Natasha. Excess in the City? Te Consumption o Imported Prints in

Colonial Calcutta.Journal o Material Culture8(1) (2003): 4574, reprinted

by permission o Sage Publications.

Gikandi, Simon. Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata o Difference,Modernism/

modernity10(3) (2003): 45580. 2003 Te Johns Hopkins University Press.

Reprinted with permission o Te Johns Hopkins University Press.


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xii

Gruzinski, Serge. Te Walls o Images, extract fromImages at War: Mexico

fom Columbus to Blade Runner, 14922019; 6986, 24447. Durham: Duke Uni-

versity Press, 2001.

Hevia, James L. Te Photography Complex: Exposing Boxer-Era China (1900

1901), Making Civilization, inPhotographies East: Te Camera and Its Histories

in East and Southeast Asia, ed. R. C. Morris, 79119. Durham: Duke University

Press, 2009.

Larkin, Brian. Colonialism and the Built Space o Cinema, in Signal and Noise:

Media, Infastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria; 12345, 26669. Durham:

Duke University Press, 2008.

Oguibe, Olu. Double Dutchand the Culture Game, inTe Culture Game,

3344. Minneapolis: University o Minnesota Press, 2004. 2004 by theRegents o the University o Minnesota.

Padrn, Ricardo. Mapping Plus Ultra: Cartography, Space, and Hispanic

Modernity, inRepresentations79(1) (2002): 2860. 2002 by the Regents

o the University o California.

Pinney, Christopher. Creole Europe: Te Reflection o a Reflection.Journal

o New Zealand Literature20 (2003): 12561.

Pinney, Christopher. Notes from the Surface o the Image: Photography, Post-Colonialism, and Vernacular Modernism, inPhotographys Other Histories, ed.

C. Pinney and N. Peterson, 20220. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

Ramaswamy, Sumathi. Maps, Mother/Goddesses, and Martyrdom in Modern

India.Journal o Asian Studies67(3) (2008): 81953.

Schmidt, Benjamin. Mapping an Exotic World: Te Global Project o Dutch

Geography, circa 1700, in Te Global Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity A. Nuss-

baum, 2137, 32730. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

Reprinted with permission o Te Johns Hopkins University Press.

Smith, erry. Visual Regimes o Colonisation: European and Aboriginal See-

ing in Australia, inPaysage et Art, ed. Ulpiano oledo Bezeera de Meneses,

91100. So Paulo: Comit Brasileiro de Historia da Arte, 2000.

Stam, Robert. Fanon, Algeria, and the Cinema: Te Politics o Identification,

inMulticulturalism, Postcoloniality, and ransnational Media, ed. E. Shohat and

R. Stam, 1843. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003.


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xiii

Stein, Eric A. Colonial Teatres o Proof: Representation and Laughter in

the 1930s Rockefeller Foundation Hygiene Cinema in Java.Health and His-

tory8(2), Health, Medicine and the Media (2006), 1444. Permission to repub-

lish granted by Hans Pols, editor oHealth and Historyand representative o the

Australian and New Zealand Society o the History o Medicine.

Tomas, Nicholas. Objects o Knowledge: Oceanic Artifacts in European

Engravings, inIn Oceania: Visions, Artiacts, Histories; 93109. Durham:

Duke University Press, 1997.

Tompson, Krista A. I am rendered speechless by your idea o beauty:

Te Picturesque in History and Art in the Postcolony, inAn Eye or the ropics:

ourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque; 25275, 32628.

Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.


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From the very beginning, this volume has been a collaborative enterprise.Its origins lie in a Dissertation Proposal Development Seminar sponsored

by the Social Science Research Council, which we were privileged to teach

in May 2009 in New Orleans and September 2009 in Philadelphia. Funded

by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, these seminars bring together

graduate students from disparate fields at the moment when they are first

formulating their dissertation topics. Our theme was Empires o Vision,

and from a very competitive field o applicants, we chose a dozen partici-

pants. Tey exceeded our most exorbitant expectations, and our marathonsessions were wonderfully productive exercises in collaborative intellectual

stimulation. Our first expression o gratitude goes to the members o the

seminar: Mustafa Avci, an ethnomusicologist from New York University;

Jill Campaiola, a media studies student from Rutgers; Josefina de la Maza

Chevesich, an art historian from the State University o New York at Stony

Brook; Christine DeLucia, an American studies student from Yale; Melissa

Heer, an art historian from the University o Minnesota, win Cities; Jessica

Horton, an art historian from the University o Rochester; Saydia Kamal, ananthropologist from the University o North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Andrea

Korta, an art historian from the University o California, Santa Barbara;

Daegan Miller, a historian from Cornell University; Deniz urker, an art

historian from the Massachusetts Institute o echnology; Katherine Wiley,

an anthropologist from Indiana University, Bloomington; and Marieke

Wilson, an anthropologist from the Johns Hopkins University. Keep your

eyes out for them; they are all future leaders in their fields. We would also

like to thank the staff, Josh DeWind, Camille Peretz, Emily Burns,


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and Lauren Shields, for the gracious exercise o their formidable organiza-

tional talents.

Our next expression o gratitude goes to David Moshfegh, who took

time away from completing his dissertation in the UC Berkeley History

Department to do Herculean combat with the multi-headed Hydra whogrants permissions for previously published essays and images. Rather than

violence, he used tenacity, wit, and charm to obtain what made this collec-

tion possible. Also crucial in that endeavor was the generous support o the

Duke University Center for International Studies and its executive director

Robert Sikorski, and the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Chair at UC Berkeley. We

are grateful as well to the staff at the Duke University Press, in particular

Ken Wissoker, Jade Brooks, and our copyeditors Laura Poole and Danielle

Szulczewski, for all their help over the long gestation o this project. Addi-tional thanks to the two anonymous readers who made helpful suggestions,

and to Diana Witt for preparing the index. But perhaps our deepest grati-

tude goes to the authors o the essays included in this volume. Te oppor-

tunity to bring their remarkable work to a new and larger audience has been

enormously gratifying.

Martin Jay

Sumathi Ramaswamy


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Te Work o Vision in

the Age o European Empires

Sumathi Ramaswamy

Te conquest o the earth, which mostly means taking it away from those who have a differ-

ent complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look

into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back o it; not a sentimen-

tal pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belie in the ideasomething that you can set up,

and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to.

Joseph Conrad,Heart o Darkness

Seeing is an art . . . which must be learnt.

William Herschel

Empires of Visionassembles recent scholarship that draws our attention to the

mutual implication o the global overseas empires o Europe and modern

regimes o visuality and their reciprocal constitution. Te past few centuries

have witnessed not only the sweeping expansion o Europe beyond its puta-

tive borders and subsequent contraction but also an exponential escalation

in the global flows o peoples, objects, ideas, technologies, and images. Tis

volume explores the range o pictorial practices, image- making technolo-

gies, and vision-oriented subjectivities that have been cultivated, desired,

and dispersed within the contexts o modern empire formation and decolo-

nization. Te essays collected here consider the transformations undergone

by these technologies, practices, and subjectivities as they get entangled

in empire-building, nationalist reactions, postcolonial contestations, and

transnational globalization. In addition to tracking the intertwined histories

o empire and vision in modernity, the selections elucidate what might

be specifically colonial about the image-making technologies, practices, and

subjectivities encountered in these pages. Te goal is also to understand


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the (post)colonial as among many competing ocular fields in the scopic

regimes o modernity. In considering these themes,Empires o Visionalso

opens up for scrutiny what Europe looks like when seen with (post)colo-

nial eyes.

As such, this volume is located at the intersection o two vibrant cross-disciplinary fields in contemporary humanist and social scientific scholar-

shipcolonial and postcolonial studies and visual cultureand invites the

reader to consider the new configurations and reordering o received knowl-

edge enabled by this nexus. Adapting from Ann Laura Stoler, the question is

the force of the imagein empire-building and self-making. Section I, Te Im-

perial Optic, is concerned substantively with modern European empires as

image-making, image-consuming, and image-collecting regimes and with

sketching the lineaments o an optical theory o colonial power. Teoreti-cally and conceptually, the essays in this section illuminate the place o visu-

alityo seeing and being seenin what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak called

the planned epistemic violence o the imperialist project. Primarily (but

not exclusively) focused on empire formation and consolidation in the age

following the Industrial Revolution, they explore the global dispersal o

five image-making technologies that fundamentally reconstituted the visual

regimes o both Europe and its colonies: oil and easel painting, mechanically

reproduced print (in its many forms), maps and landscape imagery, pho-tography, and film. Rather than presume these image-makers as uniquely

Western technologies whose development was exclusively molded by iso-

lated (and heroic) individuals located in the metropole, we learn from these

works that they are imperially dispersed but locally appropriated in creative

and unexpected ways. We are also interested in understanding why Europes

industrial empires cultivated these particular visual technologies and the

image practices and protocols o seeing associated with them, and how in

turn these were transformed through their entanglement in colonial andimperial projects. In making the case for the constitutive role o vision in

the age o global overseas empires and imperialisms role in shaping modern

visuality, this section examines the various means by which the naked eye

came to be vastly enhanced and extended through the technological innova-

tions o industrial modernity even while skepticism and suspicion accumu-

lates about and around the colonizing power o the gaze and the look.

Furthermore,Empires o Visionsuggests that the influential postcolonial

argument Can the subaltern speak? has to be necessarily supplemented


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and here I use the term in the complex Derridean sensewith questions o

seeing and looking. Does the empire not only speak and write back but also

look back in unexpected ways, and at whom and with what effect? Does sub-

altern seeing extend imperial ways o looking even in the course o counter-

ing it, does it produce an alternative emancipatory vision, or is it a haphaz-ard mix o both? Section II, Postcolonial Looking, shifts the focus from

image-making technologies to the subaltern image-worker, both resident in

Europes overseas colonies and increasingly in the metropole (such as Yinka

Shonibare, one o whose works serves as the cover illustration for this vol-

ume). In the decades accompanying and following formal decolonization,

many artists immigrated to the metropole, demographically transforming

the very heart o whiteness in the process. In such voyages in, to borrow

Edward Saids felicitous formulation, what happens to Europe itsel as anobject o regardand reference? Tis is an important question to ask i we

want to understand how Europe as sovereign subject changes when viewed

from the perspective o the global flow o images and visual apparatuses and

from imperially transformed habits o seeing and being seen.

Te essays collected in this volume draw in various ways on postcolo-

nial theory in all its myriad dimensions. At the same time, they manifest the

limits o that theory whose own theoretical and conceptual roots largely

draw on the world o words. But images are not mere illustrations or pas-sive reflections o something already established elsewhere through the vast

verbal archives o these modern industrial empires; instead, imperial and

postcolonial history, culture, and politics are at least partly constituted by

struggles occurring at the level o the image. Tis volume demonstrates

that the image is a site where new accounts o empire, the (post)colony, and

Europe itsel emerge that depart fromeven challengethe more familiar

narrative line(s) o nonvisual histories. Tis is fundamentally what is at stake

in this project. We are interested not so much in making a case for the sov-ereignty o the imagethat would be a futile, even undesirable exercise

as in arguing against treating it as merely an eye-catching accessory. At the

very least, by placing the colonizing image (and its linked technologies

and subjectivities) at the center o our thinking, theorizing, and writing, we

aim to expand and complicate the archive on the basis o which both im-

perial histories and the histories o modern vision in the industrial age have

been written so far. We seek to write against the disciplinary confinement

and containment o images to the academic field o art history, where they


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have been understood until recently with a lamentable lack o attention to

the colonial and the postcolonial; this, too, is at stake.

Empires o vision becomes a productive concept with which to work

onlywhen the boundaries o both constitutive terms o our titleempire

andvisionare tested by asking which aspects o empire did not leave theirtrace in the image or the figural, and correspondingly, which modalities o

the visual have been unconcerned or indifferent to the impress o imperial-

ism. Our selections teach us that it is not a matter o whether art follows

empire (as Sir Joshua Reynolds claimed circa 1790) or whether empire

follows art (as contrarily amended by William Blake circa 181020), but

that empire and artor more broadly, power/knowledge and visual subjec-

tivitiesare mutually constituted and entwined, both in the colonies and in

the metropole. Furthermore, the extraordinary movements o images acrossneatly laid borders and geopolitical boundaries, as well as the heterogeneous

uses to which visual technologies have been put, challenge theories that con-

ceive o the West and the East, the colonizer and colonized, the center and

the periphery, as Manichean oppositions locked in perpetual struggles o

domination on the one hand and subordination or resistance on the other.

What we are instead learning from the work o the image in colonial and

postcolonial settings is to consider empire formation as a messy business o

mutual entanglements and imbrications, o collisions and compromises, ando desiring-while-disavowing and disavowing-while-desiring. Europe or its

technologies no longer appear as the sole motor o modern visual culture;

by the same token, the colonies can no longer be cast as either passive recipi-

ents o the white mans magic or massive resistors o formations and influ-

ences fanning out from Europe. Faced with such enmeshments, ideological

undertakings such as visual decolonization, motivated by nativism and na-

tionalism, seem inadequate (and even, possibly, undesirable), as do studies

based on an insulated and fenced-off Europepure, white, untouched, anduntropicalized. Indeed, as Christopher Pinney writes, Europe was always

a reflection o other times and places, never a self-present unity awaiting its

replicatory colonial enunciation. Nowhere is this arguably more appar-

ent than in the realm o the visual, and demonstrating this is also one o the

briefs o this collection being assembled at a time when the very concept o

Europea Europe in black and whiteis generating new scholarly and

media discussion.


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Te Panic o the Visual in (Post)Colonial Studies

Tis collection is consciously poised against what Barbara Stafford has iden-

tified as the entrenched antivisualism pervading western neo-Platonizing

discourse from the Enlightenment forward. Commenting on the totemiza-tion o language in the putative West where writing is identified with intel-

lectual potency, Stafford observes that the passionate visualist is haunted

by the paradoxical ubiquity and degradation o images: everywhere trans-

mitted, universally viewed, but as a category generally despised. More so

than verbal genres, images have historically been perceived as more treacher-

ous and lacking in integrity, in the face o which she calls for making public

the affirmative actions o images throughout time and across civilizations.

Tis entails recognizing their marvelous capacity to make abstractions con-crete, their ability to provide both meaningful direction and delight to the

individual thrashing her way through the maze o experience. Te need

to make public the affirmative work o images is even more urgent in colo-

nial and postcolonial contexts weighed down by the additional burden o

the European denigration and delegitimization o preexisting and native

visual cultures on one hand, and their exoticization and sensationalization

on the other hand. At the same time, all such affirmative attempts rub up

against the undeniable fact that visual technologies and practices frequentlyunderwrote colonial governance and power. Steering a path between af-

firming the virtue o images and charting their participation (vicariously

or conscientiously) in new regimes o imperial mastery over the Other is a

challenge faced by all those who work at the nexus o empire and vision.

In going against the grain o the entrenched antivisualism o much social

scientific thought and practice, the image interrupts and intervenes, dis-

turbing the discursive field o colonial and postcolonial studies that has for

long been dominated by the hegemony o the word and the tyranny o thetextual archive. A few years ago, in a conversation with W. J. . Mitchell,

Edward Said revealed that he got tongue-tied when asked about pictures,

admitting that just to think about the visual arts generally sends me into a

panic. Tis is an ironic confession from a scholar whose work has exerted

enormous influence on those who think and write at the intersection o im-

perialism, postcolonialism, and visuality. I seize on the wordpanicin Saids

disclosure, however, and use it to argue that the value o the sometimes

disorderly, frequently unpredictable, and occasionally incoherent world o


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images lies precisely in its capacity to disrupt the flow o history- as-usual

based on the certitudes o the written word; to take us down routes not

readily available in the official archives o the state with their privileging o

the document; and to bring to the center o our analyses that which is un-

sayable and ineffablethat which words have failed. Almost a century ago,Walter Benjamin, in his aphoristic Teses on the Philosophy o History,

proposed that to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize

it the way it really was. Instead, it means to seize hold o a memory as it

flashes up at a moment o danger . . . to retain that image o the past which

unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment o dan-

ger. As others have noted, the historical materialist actively and creatively

shuttles between the present and the past, between the living and the dead,

with the all-too-keen awareness that every image o the past that is notrecognized by the present as one o its own concerns threatens to disappear

irretrievably. Tis urgent need to retrieve and redeem images and visual

technologies that have all too quickly been dismissed as inconsequential or

marginal to the serious business o empire-building or anticolonial politics

underlies the work o the scholars collected in this volume.

In visually panicking the field o colonial and postcolonial studies,

Edward Saids presence looms large, all the more noteworthy because

neither his Orientalism(1978) nor hisCulture and Imperialism(1993) criti-cally engaged with the graphic image or pictorial practice. All the same,

as Saloni Mathur has eloquently argued, Saids early critique refutes any

approach that views the realm o art and aesthetics as relatively autono-

mous, or existing in a super-structural relation to the economic, social and

political spheres. In his later work, Said directed our attention to the

massively knotted and complex histories o colonizer and colonized that

are perforce the product o the dynamically interconnected field occupied

by both Europe and its colonies since at least the age o industrial capital-ism. Tis led him to suggest that the seemingly discrepant experiences

o colony and metropole, hitherto radically separated, be read contrapun-

tally, as making up a set o what I call intertwined and overlapping histo-

ries. Such contrapuntal readings would serve as an alternative both to a

politics o blame and to the even more destructive politics o confrontation

and hostility.

In the wake o the publication o Orientalismin 1978, art historian Linda

Nochlin was among the first to extend its insights to the field o visualstudies in her reflections on nineteenth-century French Orientalist painting


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7

and its relationship to colonial ideology. Nochlin wrote her essay explic-

itly in response to an exhibition in 1982 called Orientalism: Te Near East

in French Painting 18001880, whose catalog invoked Said only to distance

itsel from any examination o the political scaffolding that enabled such

works to emerge in the first place. Categorically rejecting the insulation othe realm o aesthetics from colonial ideology and also calling into question

her own disciplines canon, which had marginalized such artworks, Nochlin

identified the absences and excesses that enabled the European white male

artist to paint and frame the Orient for Western contemplation and con-

sumption. So Orientalist painting is marked by an absence o history or

change, industrious work by natives, and the looming colonial presence in

the Orient, especially the violence visited on the conquered (land). On the

other hand, the fleshly native body is displayed in excessive plenitude, typi-cally in settings and postures o lassitude and indulgence, especially as the

nude female and the cruel despotic male. Gratuitous attention to redundant

architectural details (which added to the reality effect o these works) and

ethnographic exactitude are other hallmarks o this prolific genre that domi-

nated European attempts pictorially to enframe the Orient.

Nochlins astute observations today are vulnerable to some o the same

criticisms leveled against Said, including the neglect o participation by

Orientals themselves in Orientalist art-making or o native resistance tosuch caricatures. As Roger Benjamin persuasively shows in a revealing

catalog essay published in 1997, Europes Orientalist art is very much in

demand among collectors o Arab and urkish origin, who seem to value

it because it appears to them to restore a lost past: Te fact that it was

Western artists who had the means to record such images is almost inciden-

tal from this perspective. Faced with the paradox o the so-called Ori-

entals as assiduous collectors o Orientalist art that apparently demeaned

and denigrated them, Benjamin invites us to consider how such acts o re-possession o European cultural documents may instead be read as an as-

sertion o selfhood, and as redressing historical imbalances. Although

the Saidian framework adapted by Nochlin does not readily explain such

paradoxes, her essay nevertheless inserted the critical new problematic o

visual orientalism into art historical and colonial studies by inexorably

linking art, aesthetics, and colonial power/knowledge, a problematic that

has been enormously enabling for those who have written in her wake.

Indeed, so enduring is this paradigm shift that a critic o the Saidian ap-proach like John Mackenzie who seeks to undo the connection and return


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8

the art o the imperial age to a realm untouched by colonial politics, ideol-

ogy, and operations o power seems unconvincing, although his cautionary

comments against homogenizing all experiences under the single umbrella

o Orientalism is important.

Te nexus between power, visuality, and the global spread o Europeanempires is also at the heart o Mary Louise PrattsImperial Eyes: ravel Writ-

ing and ransculturation(1992), another work that, although based largely

on analyses o the written word, has left its mark on those who write on

colonial visual cultures and economies. Like the later Said, whom interest-

ingly she does not invoke, Pratt is concerned with the constitution o the

domestic subject o Euroimperialism through practices o travel, acts o

discovery, and masterful writing. In contrast to Orientalism,Imperial Eyes

includes (brief) analyses o close to forty images drawn from eighteenth-and nineteenth-century travel writings that are a product o the age o me-

chanical reproduction discussed at greater length in part 2 o section I, Te

Mass-Printed Imperium. Such mass-produced printsand the narratives in

which they were embeddedemerge in the contact zone, social spaces in

distant lands away from the metropole where subjects previously separated

by geographic and historical disjunctures meet, clash, and grapple with each

other, often in highly asymmetrical relations o domination and subordi-

nation. Prints like these were the work o a wide- ranging male imperialeye that perforce adopted a monarch-of-all-I survey stance that anchored

nineteenth-century travel narratives. Such promontory images o subor-

dinated lands and the peoples who inhabited themviewed by the imperial

eye from a distance or from a safe spot above themmasterfully reordered

them as would a painting, appropriating them into European schemes o

possession, enjoyment, and desire. In Pratts analysis, domination and con-

trol emerge from such imperial protocols o seeing and gazing (upon). Sight,

therefore, is critical to the imperial enterprise that, in her understanding, is arelation o masterypredicated between the seer and the seen.

Although she does not invoke him, Pratts argument regarding the con-

stitutive capacity o sight and vision in the politics o imperialism recalls the

powerfully evocative discussion, indebted to Jean-Paul Sartre, o the look

and modern subject-formation in Frantz FanonsBlack Skin, White Masks.

As Robert Stam writes in his essay included in this collection, there has

been a tremendous resurgence o scholarly interest in the past few decades

in the works o this West Indiesborn, French-educated writer who prac-ticed psychotherapy in North Africa in the 1940s and 1950s, and who with


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9

extraordinary prescience anticipated much that is central to cultural studies

and postcolonial theory as we know and practice them today. Even Michael

aussigs recent call to pay attention to color as the motor o world and

colonial history had already been signaled in Fanons much-invoked discus-

sion o the fact o blackness as the sine qua non o empire. Te image-saturated and visually charged vocabulary o his writings makes Fanon a

disturbing figure for a colonial and postcolonial studies steeped in the

world o words and texts. Consider statements such as All around me the

white man . . . All this whiteness that burns me; or, the black woman asks

for nothing, demands for nothing, except for a little whiteness in her life;

and most iconically, the opening assertion o chapter 5 inBlack Skin, White

Masks, Look, a Negro. Such inexorable connections that Fanon makes

on subject formation triggered by the look from the place o the Otherin the cauldron o color (Te glances o the other fixed me there, in the

sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye . . . Look at the nigger!

. . . Mama, a Negro!) enables his writings to panic the field o textually

driven colonial scholarship, which otherwise takes for granted the power o

color and the color o power.

Colonizing Visual Studies

In one o the founding moments o postcolonial critique in 1985, Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak observed: I . . . we concentrated on documenting and

theorizing the itinerary o the consolidation o Europe as sovereign subject,

indeed sovereign and subject, then we would produce an alternative his-

torical narrative o the worlding o what is today called the Tird World.

o think o the Tird World as distant cultures, exploited but with rich

heritages waiting to be recovered, interpreted and curricularized in English

translation helps the emergence o the Tird World as a signifier that allowsus to forget that worlding.

Trough such a worlding, hitherto uninscribed and uncolonized space is

forcefully brought into a world (via activities such as cartographic mapping)

that has been essentially constituted around and by the idea o Europe.

Spivaks arguments regarding worlding compel us to move even beyond

the important conjuncture between operations o colonial power/knowl-

edge and the production o artworks toward which Said and Nochlin take

us, by suggesting that colonial violence was not so much the precondition oor pretext for modern visual culture but critically integral to its very making,


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10

for, as Deborah Cherry reminds us, it was in the planned epistemic vio-

lence o the imperialist project that earth was transformed into world, land

into landscape. o forget the worlding o the world through the project

o imperialism has consequences not just for the way we think about lands

and lives outside Europe but for Europe itsel and its particularistic experi-ences writ large as History and Teory.

Fanon, Said, Pratt: we encounter their names and works, although rarely

constitutively, in the numerous visual culture anthologies and readers that

have proliferated in the academic marketplace since the onset o the so-

called visual turn in the human sciences. Despite the massive presence o

Europes imperial project and its aftermath in the very centuries in which

metropolitan theorists o the visual and the image issued their authoritative

statements, empire is not an organizing idea or argument for most existingpublished collections or surveys on modernitys visual culture. In 1996,

the influential journal Octoberpublished a widely read and much-quoted

Visual Culture Questionnaire. Responses to four questions on the then-

emergent cross-disciplinary field o visual culture were invited from a range

o art and architecture historians, film theorists, historians, literary critics,

and artists, nineteen o which were published. It is telling that not one re-

spondent was a dedicated specialist on the worlds outside Euro-America,

even though the questionnaire sought a response to the claim that the newvisual studies prepared subjects for the next stage o globalized capital.

With one exceptionthe historian o art Keith Moxey rightly observed in

passing that the assumed universality o European art and aesthetics was

critical to the exercise o colonial powerno respondent even commented

on the presence o large global empires as one o the constitutive matrixes

within which modern visual culture was forged between the sixteenth and

twentieth centuries.

Tis questionnaire is not alone in this regard. Critical theorist W. J. .Mitchells 1995 model syllabus on the new visual studies, organized around

the rubrics o signs, bodies, and worlds, largely ignores European

empire-building as a constitutive phenomenon. Te nineteenth century

was fundamentally reconstituted by European imperialism at home and

abroad and famously inaugurated a global scramble for colonies whose

consequences we are still living with multiple decades later. Yet the other-

wise exemplary Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Readermerely gestures

toward the reordering force o this global project. A recent anthologycalled Images: A Readerdoes not even do this. wo other recent works


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11

that bring together the reflections o key thinkers in this vibrant field o

visual studies do not heed scholars whose work has been informed by their

engagement with the colonial and the postcolonial. Critical erms or Art

History, edited by Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (University o Chi-

cago Press, 1996; 2003) does not include empireas one o the critical termsnecessary for us to understand art history.Art since 1900: Modernism, Anti-

modernism, and Postmodernism(Tames & Hudson, 2004) edited by Hal

Foster and his colleagues at October, has only passing references to Europes

colonial projects and their undoing in the twentieth century and a mere nod

toward postcolonial theory. As I hope that the reader will (re)learn from

Simon Gikandis essay on Pablo Picassos foundational encounter with Afri-

can art reproduced in this volume, it is impossible to think o modernism,

antimodernism, and postmodernism without thinking o Europes aestheticconfrontation with the Other.

Te result o such erasures and silences is that there is now a new visual

studies canon in which the historical experience o European visuality is un-

problematically taken as universally true and valid, or just as perniciously, it

is assumed that there is a distinctive non-Western aesthetic that should be

a matter o concern for only those who study parts o the world outside o

Euro-America. Te fundamental reshaping o modern and global visual cul-

ture by Europes encounter with and control over the Other remains mas-sively occluded. Certain themes have become de rigueurthe mechanical

reproduction o the image, the society o the spectacle, scopic regimes, the

simulacrum, the fetish, and the gaze most notablyyet the colonial roots

o such concepts or their postcolonial trajectories have been barely interro-

gated. In her response to the Visual Culture Questionnaire in 1996, Susan

Buck-Morss quipped (from a position very much within the U.S. academy),

Visual culture, once a foreigner to the academy, has gotten its green card

and is here to stay.Empires o Visionis a (gentle) reminder that large num-bers o green card holders today hail from former colonies o European em-

pires, and their visual experiencesand theories based on themare here

to stay as well and even to demand equal rights.

Hating Empires Images Properly

Te twin assertion o this volume is therefore that no history o imperial-

ism is complete without heeding the constitutive capacity o visuality, andcorrespondingly, no history o modern visuality can ignore the constitutive


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12

fact o empire. Images interrupt and realign the flows o a textually driven

colonial and postcolonial scholarship; correspondingly, facts o empire and

the postcolony disrupt the claims o metropolitan visual culture and image

studies: these are the reordering forces at work in this volume.

In making these assertions, this volume benefits hugely from whatMitchell has identified acutely as the pictorial turn in the human sciences:

Whatever the pictorial turn is, then, it should be clear that it is not a

return to naive mimesis, copy or correspondence theories o represen-

tation, or a renewed metaphysics o pictorial presence; it is a rather

a post-linguistic, post-semiotic rediscovery o the picture as a complex

interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourses, bodies

and figurality. It is the realization thatspectatorship(the look, the gaze,the glance, the practices o observation, surveillance, and visual pleasure)

may be as deep a problem as various forms o reading(decipherment, de-

coding, interpreting, etc.) and that visual experience or visual literacy

might not be fully explicable on the model o textuality. Most important,

it is the realization that while the problem o pictorial representation

has always been with us, it presses inescapably now, and with unprece-

dented force, on every level o culture, from the most refined philosophi-

cal speculations to the most vulgar productions o the mass media. radi-

tional strategies o containment no longer seem inadequate, and the need

for a global critique o visual culture seems inescapable.

Yet Mitchells call for a global critique o visual culture is possible onlyi

we think Europe and its (former) colonies together within the same field o

inquiry. Tis is a fact that is especially important to underscore in our glob-

ally post-imperial, endlessly neo-imperial moment. In scrutinizing the

work o vision in the age o European empires, which necessarily includes

an analysis o the postcolonial aftermath, we ought to be concerned withwhat a particular art object or visual document might mean in its own times,

and as importantly with tracking how it does its work, producing effects in

the world that range from power and mastery to desire, ambivalence, and

anxiety. Even more insistently, instead o considering a visual practice or

an image-maker as merely a means to know something else, be it empire

or modernity, race, or difference, we ought to be committed to these

as objects o knowledge in and o themselves, as world-making and world-

disclosing, rather than merely world-mirroring. Te essays reproduced hereneither naively celebrate empires visual work nor innocently go about the


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13

task o recuperating it. Instead, they document the contradictions and am-

bivalences in the very processes by which territorial conquest, settlement,

and mastery went hand in hand with ocular possession and ordering.

As Joseph Conrad observed, empire indeed is not a pretty thing when

one looks into it too much. Nevertheless, it is important to look deeplyand systematically because imperial acts o looking (and being looked at),

the technologies for looking and for documenting the observed, and the

ever proliferating archives and sites for (re)presenting that-which-has-been-

looked-at have continued to endure long after the empires o the industrial

age and as formal structures o mastery and control have given way to other

(postcolonial) formations. Tis recognition also drives this volume, under-

scoring the stakes o what we look at and how we look.

As such, as we look deeply, systematically, and expansively in our post-colonial times, we ought to cultivate an ethic o hating empires images

properly. Sunil Agnani from whom I adapt this idea rethinks Teodor

Adornos enigmatic aphorism, One must have tradition in oneself, to

hate it properly, to propose One must have empire in onesel to hate

it properly. For Agnani, hating empire properly entails entering into its

terms and allowing the internal contradictions to be heightened rather than

covered over by a political veil. o paraphrase him, hating empire properly

is a peculiar combination o an antagonistic relationship to empire, along-side a (tragic?) immersion in it, a subtle form o inhabitation. Tis form

o subtle inhabitation o antagonism and immersion, o hating and (tragic)

loving at the same time, is especially true for our postcolonial encounter

with empires images, many o which remain objects o great beauty and

value, much sought after and collected, even (and possibly especially) in the

postcolonial world, i we recall Roger Benjamins work discussed earlier in

this essay. Anthropologist Liam Buckley perceptively observes as he re-

flects on the challenges o working with colonial photographs in the Gam-bian National Archives today, I projects o visual design were central to

the regulation and presentation o the imperial world, then our encounter

with that world was and remains via the medium o visual record.It was

and remains love at first sight. Paradoxically therefore, although as good

postcolonial scholars we may hate empire and with a passion, we fall in love

with its images, which we come to study with care and thought, indeed, as

Buckley insists, with love. Tese images undoubtedly depict times that we

no longer love, but nevertheless they remain loved objects themselves.I may try to wrest mysel from the amorous Image- repertoire: but the


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14

Image-repertoire burns underneath, like an incompletely extinguished peat

fire; it catches again; what was renounced reappears; out o the hasty grave

suddenly breaks a long cry. Tis condition o desiring-while-disavowing

and disavowing-while-desiring obligesus to hate empires images properly.

As Neil Lazarus reminds us in his reading o Adornos aphorism, Prop-erly . . . does not mark a plea for conformity, orderliness, civility, or good

manners. Adorno calls for something far more profoundly ruptural, far less

contained, or indeed, containable, than this . . . Adorno wishes us to learn

to hate in the right way, rigorously and thoroughly. Agnani pushes this

further to suggest that an improper hating would seem to be an example o

that which is purely oppositional, a rejection from an external position. In-

stead, following Adorno, he calls for a disposition that requires experience,

a historical memory, a fastidious intellect and above all an ample measureo satiety. Following Adorno and Agnani, then,Empires o Vision, too,

asks for a rigorous and thorough engagement with empires images with an

ample measure o satiety and a loving immersion in them, so that we

may learn to hate them properly.

Notes

1 For the influential concept o scopic regimes, see Martin Jay, Scopic Regimeso Modernity, inForce Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique

(New York: Routledge, 1992), 11433; and his concluding essay in this volume.

Given the complexity o colonial formations over time and across cultures and

spaces, it would be naive to speak o a singular imperial or postcolonial

scopic regime. Nonetheless, it is worth exploring constituent elements and fea-

tures o such a regime and identify what it might share with the other dominant

formations identified by Jay (Cartesian perspectivalism, the art o describing,

and the baroque) and what was indeed specific to the colonial condition. Like

many o the authors collected in this volume, I share with Nicholas Tomas

the foundational understanding that the dynamics o colonialism cannot be

understood i it is assumed that some unitary representation is extended from

the metropole and cast across passive spaces, unmediated by perceptions or

encounters. Colonial projects are construed, misconstrued, adapted and en-

acted by actors whose subjectivities are fracturedhal here, hal there, some-

times disloyal, sometimes almost on the side o the people they patronize and

dominate, and against the interests o some metropolitan office (see Nicholas

Tomas, Colonialisms Culture: Anthropology, ravel and Government. [Prince-

ton: Princeton University Press, 1994], 60). In spite o its recent appearance (or

perhaps because o it), the termpostcolonialhas a more complex (even vexed)


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15

history. Tough I use it here in the temporal sense o the aftermath o colonial-

ism following formal decolonization, conceptually it covers projects dedicated

to interrogating empire eccentrically, from its margins, and as Edward Said

might put it, from the perspective o its victims.

2 Ann Laura Stoler,Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and ColonialCommon Sense(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 1. Replete with

fascinating images and discursive imagery (in her discussion, for example, o

the watermark and the historical negative) this work, however, only ad-

dresses the written and textual archive o empire.

3 In this regard, consider Michael aussigs statement, Colonial history too

must be understood as a spiritual politics in which image-power is an exceed-

ingly valuable resource. Michael aussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular

History o the Senses(New York: Routledge, 1993), 177.

4 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Rani o Sirmur: An Essay in the Reading o the

Archives,History and Teory24(3) (1985): 24772, see p. 253. Although I in-

voke Spivak, I do so with the recognition that her essay is based on the reading

o a verbal archive.

5 Daniel Headricks much-cited book ools of Empire: echnology and European Im-

perialism in the Nineteenth Century(New York: Oxford University Press, 1981)

ignores the constitutive role o image- making technologies in empire forma-

tion, as also noted by Paul Landau (Empires o the Visual: Photography and

Colonial Administration in Africa, inImages and Empires: Visuality in Colonial

and Postcolonial Afica, ed. Paul S. Landau and Deborah Kaspin [Berkeley: Uni-

versity o California Press, 2002], 14171). Te scholars whose works are re-produced in this volume have played a critical role in correcting this important

oversight, as has Duke University Presss important series Object/Histories in

which this reader appears.

6 I use the term subaltern in its extended sense o the disenfranchised, mar-

ginalized, and neglected. Even as I do so, I draw attention to the fact that the

Subaltern Studies collective whose scholarship has done so much to transform

our understanding o the colonial and postcolonial world has largely ignored

images and the visual domain.

7 Edward Said,Culture and Imperialism(New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 23961. See also Rasheed Araeen, When the Naughty Children o Empire Come

Home to Roost, Tird ext20(2) (2006): 23339; and Ian Baucom and Sonya

Boyce, Shades o Black: Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain(Durham: Duke

University Press, 2005).

8 I borrow this idea from Gayatri Spivak, who writes that Europe had consoli-

dated itsel as sovereign subject by defining its colonies as Others, even as it

constituted them, for purposes o administration and the expansion o markets,

into near-images o that very sovereign self (Spivak, Rani o Sirmur, 247).

9 Homi Bhabhas formulations regarding hybridity and mimicry and Gayatri

Spivaks on worlding have had considerable influence on those who work at


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16

the intersection o visuality and imperialism. Nevertheless, in their theoriz-

ing, the visual remains a concept that is actualized in the domain o writ-

ing (Geoff Quilley and Kay Dian Kriz, Introduction: Visual Culture and the

Atlantic World, 16601830, in An Economy o Colour: Visual Culture and the

Atlantic World, 16601830, ed. Geoff Quilley and Kay Dian Kriz [Manchester:Manchester University Press, 2003], 112, quotation p. 2). For Bhabhas more

recent writings on the postcolonial art world and diasporic image practices, see

especially Homi Bhabha, Postmodernism/Postcolonialism, in Critical erms

or Art History, ed. Robert Nelson and Richard S. Schiff (Chicago: University

o Chicago Press, 2003), 43551; and Indias Dialogical Modernism: Homi K.

Bhabha in Conversation with Susan S. Bean, inMidnight to the Boom: Paint-

ing in India Ater Independence, ed. Susan S. Bean (New York: Peabody Essex

Museum in Association with Tames & Hudson, 2013), 2335.

10 Christopher Pinney,Photos o the Gods: Te Printed Image and Political Struggle

in India(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 8.

11 I am adapting here from W. J. . Mitchell, What Is Visual Culture?, inMean-

ing in the Visual Arts: Views fom the Outside (A Centennial Commemoration o

Erwin Panosky), ed. I. Lavin (Princeton: Institute for Advanced Study, 1995),

20717, see especially p. 208.

12 Hermione de Alemeida and George H. Gilpin, Indian Renaissance: British

Romantic Art and the Prospect o India(Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate Publishing,

2005), 271; W. J. . Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? Te Lives and Loves o

Images(Chicago: University o Chicago Press, 2005), 145.

13 Christopher Pinney, Creole Europe: Te Reflection o a Reflection,Journalo New Zealand Literature20 (2003): 12561; quotation on pp. 12728. Te

demonstration o the constitution o modern Europe through its colonial ad-

ventures is o course a foundational goal o the postcolonial project. Writing in

1992, Mary Louise Pratt observed, Borders and all, the entity called Europe

was constructed from the outside in as much as from the inside out. . . . While

the imperial metropolis tends to understand itsel as determining the periph-

ery . . . it habitually blinds itsel to the ways in which the periphery determines

the metropolis (Mary Louise Pratt,Imperial Eyes: ravel Writing and ranscul-

turation[London: Routledge, 1992], 6). Dipesh Chakrabartys provincializ-ing Europe project has as its agenda the task o displacing a hyperreal Europe

from the center toward which all historical imagination currently gravitates

(Dipesh Chakrabarty,Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Tought and Histori-

cal Difference[Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000], 45). See also Ella

Shohat and Robert Stam, Narrativizing Visual Culture, in Te Visual Culture

Reader, ed. N. Mirzoeff (London: Routledge, 1998), 2749, esp. pp. 2930.

14 Rodolphe Gasch, Europe, or Te Infinite ask: A Study o a Philosophical Con-

cept (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), and Manuela Ribeiro

Sanches, Fernando Clara, Joo Ferreira Duarte, and Leonor Pires Martins, eds.,

Europe in Black and White: Immigration, Race and Identity in the Old Continent


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17

(Chicago: University o Chicago Press, 2011). See also Martin Jays concluding

essay in this volume.

15 Barbara Maria Stafford,Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue o Images(Cambridge,

MA: Press, 1995), 5, 1112. See also Martin Jay,Downcast Eyes: Te Deni-

gration o Vision in wentieth-Century French Tought(Berkeley: University oCalifornia Press, 1994).

16 On the virtue o images, see Stafford,Good Looking.

17 I borrow and adapt this argument from Roland Barthes via Christopher Pinney.

See Christopher Pinney, Te Coming o Photography in India(London: British

Library, 2008), 5. Among pioneering scholars who early on interrupted via

the image the textualist preoccupations o colonial studies, Bernard Smith,

especially hisEuropean Vision and the South Pacificmust be singled out (1960;

New Haven, C: Yale University Press, 1985). In this and other works, Smith

demonstrated how since the eighteenth century, the Pacific Ocean and its vari-

ous landmasses came to be visually constituted through the image work o ex-

plorers, scientists, and artists (both metropolitan and native) across a range o

visual media, including scientific illustration and the travel narratives. Several

early volumes in John Mackenzies Studies in Imperialismseries (published by

Manchester Press) should also be mentioned in this regard. Over the past de-

cade, the number o monographs, edited volumes, and journal articles on this

subject have dramatically increased. I especially draw the readers attention to

the following collections that serve as good introductions to the key debates:

Catherine B. Asher and Tomas R. Metcalf, eds., Perceptions o South Asias

Visual Past(New Delhi: American Institute o Indian Studies, 1994); Paul S.Landau and Deborah Kaspin, eds., Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial

and Postcolonial Afica(Berkeley: University o California Press, 2002); . J.

Barringer, Geoff Quilley, and Douglas Fordham, eds.,Art and the British Em-

pire(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Quilley and Kriz, An

Economy o Colour; and Volker M. Langbehn, ed., German Colonialism, Visual

Culture and Modern Memory(London: Routledge, 2010). For an introduction

to the visual culture o the end o empire, see especially Simon Faulkner and

Anandi Ramamurthy, Visual Culture and Decolonisation in Britain(London:

Ashgate, 2006).18 W. J. . Mitchell, Te Panic o the Visual: A Conversation with Edward W.

Said, in Edward Said and the Work o the Critic: Speaking ruth to Power, ed.

Paul A. Bov (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 3150, see esp. pp. 3132.

19 James Elkins,On Pictures and the Words Tat Fail Tem(Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1998). See especially pp. 24166 for a discussion o the un-

representable, the unpicturable, the inconceivable, and the unseeable.

20 Walter Benjamin, Teses on the Philosophy o History, [1940] inIllumina-

tions: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1985),

25364; quotations on p. 255.

21 Many critics have puzzled over the absence o attention to images in the work


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18

o a scholar who has written so much on the connection between power, visu-

ality, and spatiality. For example, Derek Gregory, Orientalism Re-Viewed,

History Workshop Journal44 (Autumn 1997): 26978, 273; and Edmund Burke

and David Prochaska, Introduction: Orientalism from Postcolonial Teory

to World Teory, in Genealogies o Orientalism: History, Teory, Politics, ed.E. Burke and D. Prochaska (Lincoln: University o Nebraska Press, 2008),

174, 33. Te cover illustration for the paperback version o Orientalism(1979)

is a detail from Jean-Lon Grmes Les charmeurs des serpents(circa 1880), a

classic example o French Orientalism. Neither the artist nor the painting is ana-

lyzed by Said, leading the reader to wonder whether this seductively symbolic

packaging is o the authors or publishers choosing (Daniel Martin Varisco,

Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid [Seattle: University o Washington

Press, 2007], 2425). Tis is also the case with the striking image that adorns

the Random House paperback version o Culture and Imperialism(1994), Henri

Rousseaus Te Representatives o the Foreign Powers, Coming to Hail the Republic

as a oken o Peace(1907). Reprints o bothOrientalismandCulture and Imperi-

alismfeature other striking cover images. At the very least, such book covers,

when left unaccompanied by explanations or justifications for their choice, raise

the issue o images being taken out o context and mobilized in new circuits o

consumption that range from voyeurism to bafflement.

22 Saloni Mathur,India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display(Berkeley:

University o California Press, 2007), 7.

23 Said,Culture and Imperialism, 32.

24 Said,Culture and Imperialism, 18; see also pp. 3143. 25 Linda Nochlin, Te Imaginary Orient, Art in America 71 (1983): 11831,

18689; subsequently, the essay was reprinted in Linda Nochlin, Te Politics

o Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society(New York: Harper and

Row, 1989), 3360. Nochlin notes that although the insights offered by Saids

Orientalismare central to her arguments, Saids book does not deal with the

visual arts at all (Imaginary Orient, n. 3). For some other reevaluations o

colonial art and aesthetics, published soon after in response to Orientalism, see

Olivier Richon, Representation, the Despot, and the Harem: Some Ques-

tions around an Academic Orientalist Painting by Lecomte-de-Nouy (1885),inEurope and its Other, ed. F. Barker (Colchester: University o Sussex Press,

1985), 1113; James Tompson, Te East: Imagined, Experienced, Remembered:

Orientalist Nineteenth Century Painting(Dublin: National Gallery o Ireland,

1988); Asher and Metcalf,Perceptions o South Asias Visual Past; and Te Lure o

the East: British Orientalist Painting, ed. Nicholas romans (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2008).

26 Nochlin, Imaginary Orient, 119. Te exhibition was on display in museums

at the University o Rochester and State University o New York in late 1982.

27 I borrow the notion o enframing from Martin Heidegger, Te Age o the

World Picture, in Te Question Concerning echnology and Other Essays(New


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19

York: Garland 1977), 11554. For a pioneering use o this concept in a colonial

context, see imothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt(Berkeley: University o Cali-

fornia Press, 1988). Building on Nochlin, Olivier Richon characterizes French

Orientalist art as fundamentally a creation o nineteenth-century imperialism

(Representation, the Despot, and the Harem, 2). See also Darcy GrimaldoGrigsby, Extremities: Painting Empire in Post- Revolutionary France(London:

Yale University Press, 2002); and Roger Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics: Art,

Colonialism, and French North Afica, 18801930(Berkeley: University o Califor-

nia Press, 2003).

28 For a sustained criticism o Nochlins approach, see especially John MacKenzie,

Orientalism: History, Teory and the Arts(Manchester: Manchester University

Press, 1995), 45 ff. For post-Saidian attempts to disturb the neat divisions o

Orientalisms imaginative geography, see especially Jill Beaulieu and Mary

Roberts, eds., Orientalisms Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography

(Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).

29 Roger Benjamin, Post-Colonial aste: Non-Western Markets for Orientalist

Art, in Orientalism: From Delacroix to Klee (Exhibition Catalogue)(Sydney: Art

Gallery o New South Wales, 1997), 3240; quotation on p. 33. See also Krista

Tompsons essay in this volume.

30 Benjamin, Post-Colonial aste.

31 Burke and Prochaska, Introduction, 34.

32 Insisting that European creative arts acted in counterpoint rather then confor-

mity to imperial ideologies, Mackenzie writes, there is little evidence o a nec-

essary coherence between the imposition o direct imperial rule and the visualarts (Mackenzie, Orientalism, 1415). Statements like these are unfortunate,

because studies published in Mackenzies pioneering series Studies in Imperial-

ismfrom Manchester University Press, have helped lay the groundwork for the

burgeoning scholarship on empire and visual culture. For a useful discussion

that compares Saids and Mackenzies approaches, see Gregory, Orientalism

Re-viewed.

33 A second edition with a new preface was published by Routledge in 2008.

34 Tis is a term that she borrowed from Spivak (Pratt,Imperial Eyes, 4).

35 Pratt,Imperial Eyes, 204, emphasis in original. For a recent fascinating analysiso how such visual mastery over and surveillance o native terrains was fur-

ther consolidated with the spread o colonial aviation, see Federico Caprotti,

Visuality, Hybridity, and Colonialism: Imagining Ethiopia through Colonial

Aviation, 19351940,Annals o the Association o American Geographers101(2)

(2011): 380403.

36 Originally published in French asPeau Noire, Masques Blancs(1952), this pio-

neering work was translated into English in 1967.

37 Arguing that the Western experience o colonization is the experience o

colored Otherness, aussig evocatively characterizes the past four centuries

as the layered history o Western expansion into the lands o colored people,


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20

home to all manner o bright colors and wondrous varnishes (Michael aussig,

What Color Is the Sacred?[Chicago: University o Chicago Press, 2009], 160).

Tis expansion (and the fantasies that nurtured it) effectively divided the world

into chromophobes and chromophiliacs (16).

38 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks(New York: Grove Press, 1967), 114,42, 109. I have benefited here especially from the analysis o Fanons phenome-

nology o the racial look in Bill Schwarz, Afterword: Ways o Seeing, in

Visual Culture and Decolonisation in Britain, ed. Simon Faulkner and Anandi

Ramamurthy (London: Ashgate, 2006), 26370.

39 Stuart Hall, Te After-life o Frantz Fanon, in Te Fact o Blackness: Frantz

Fanon and Visual Representation, ed. Alan Read (London: Institute o Contem-

porary Arts, 1996), 1337.

40 Spivak, Rani o Simur, 247. In formulating this argument, Spivak built on

Martin Heideggers essay on the origins o the work o art.

41 Deborah Cherry, Earth into World, Land into Landscape: Te Worlding o

Algeria in Nineteenth-Century British Feminism, in Orientalisms Interlocu-

tors: Painting, Architecture, Photography, ed. J. Beaulieu and M. Roberts (Dur-

ham: Duke University Press, 2002), 10330, quotation from pp. 1067.

42 An exception here are the two editions o Nicholas MirzoeffsTe Visual Cul-

ture Reader(Routledge, 1998, 2002), which excerpted landmark essays by such

leading figures as Malek Alloula, Anne McClintock, and imothy Mitchell,

who wrote at the intersection o visuality and colonialism, even while noting

(in 1998) that the field was still very emergent (a third edition was released in

2012). Soon after the publication o the first edition o Mirzoeff s volume, Sagepublished Visual Culture: A Reader, edited by Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall

(1999; subsequently reprinted). Although this volume incorporates valuable

pieces by Fanon, Pratt, and Bhabha, clearly colonialism or empire formation is

not an organizing concern.

43 Visual Culture Questionnaire,October77 (Summer 1996): 2570; quotation

on p. 25.

44 Visual Culture Questionnaire, 58.

45 Mitchell, What Is Visual Culture?, 21014. Te occlusion o the colonial

question in this syllabus is especially noteworthy given Mitchells importantreflections on the relationship between landscape painting and European im-

perialism (W. J. . Mitchell, Imperial Landscape, inLandscape and Power, ed.

W. J. . Mitchell [Chicago: University o Chicago Press, 1994], 534). See also

his argument that art and aesthetics emerged as critical categories in the age

o colonial encounters in W. J. . Mitchell, Empire and Objecthood, in What

Do Pictures Want?, 14568.

46 Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski, ed.,Te Nineteenth-Century

Visual Culture Reader(New York: Routledge, 2004).

47 Sunil Manghani, Arthur Piper, and Jon Simons, ed.,Images: A Reader(Lon-

don: Sage, 2006).


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21

48 Margarita Dikovitskaya, Visual Culture: Te Study o the Visual ater the Cul-

tural urn(Cambridge, MA: Press, 2005); Marquard Smith,Visual Culture

Studies: Interviews with Key Tinkers(Los Angeles: Sage, 2008).

49 Stuart Hall observes as well, Te world is . . . littered by modernities and by

practicing artists, who never regarded modernism as the secure possession othe West, but perceived it as a language which was both open to them but which

they would have to transform (Stuart Hall, Museums o Modern Art and the

End o History, inModernity and Difference, ed. S. Hall and S. Maharaj [Lon-

don: Institute o International Visual Arts, 2001], 19). See also in this regard

Said, Culture and Imperialism, 24243, and Sieglinde Lemke, Picassos Dusty

Manikins, in Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins o rans-

atlantic Modernism(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3158.

50 Ella Shohat and Robert Stam make this point even more trenchantly: Europe

thus appropriated the material and cultural production o non-Europeans while

denying both their achievements and its own appropriation, thus consolidating

its sense o sel and glorifying its own cultural anthropophagy (Narrativizing

Visual Culture, 28).

51 Visual Culture Questionnaire, 2930.

52 W. J. . Mitchell,Picture Teory: Essays on Visual and Verbal Representation(Chi-

cago: University o Chicago Press, 1994), 16 (emphases in original).

53. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer o an earlier draft o this introduction,

who I quote.

54 For an eloquent defense o looking at rather than looking through images,

see Michael Gaudio, Engraving the Savage: Te New World and echniques oCivilization(Minneapolis: University o Minnesota Press, 2008).

55 Sunil Agnani,Hating Empire Properly: Te wo Indies and the Limits o Enlight-

enment Anticolonialism(New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).

56 Agnani,Hating Empire Properly, 18687. Agnani also refers to Neil Lazaruss

critique o Adornos aphorism in which he clarifies, to hate tradition properly

is rather to mobilize its own protocols, procedures, and interior logic against

itto demonstrate that it is only on the basis o a project that exceeds its own

horizons or self-consciousness that tradition can possibly be imagined redeem-

ing its own pledges (Neil Lazarus, Hating radition Properly,New Forma-tions38 [1999]: 930; quotation on p. 13).

57 See also Krista Tompson in this volume.

58 Liam Buckley, Objects o Love and Decay: Colonial Photographs in a Post-

colonial Archive, Cultural Anthropology20(2) (2005): 24970; quotation on

p. 265, emphasis added.

59 Buckley, Objects o Love and Decay, 265. Correspondingly, our discourse

about them, a lovers discourse, betrays our feelings for, and intimacy with,

colonial culture (250). See also British filmmaker Isaac Juliens observation,

I also wonder about the kind o murky question o our attraction to these

imagesthis question o having perhaps a critical nostalgia, the fact that some


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o these images are in fact quite beautiful, some o them are very disturbing,

and this kind o surplus identification that comes about when looking at these

images (Isaac Julien, Undoing the Colonial Archive, inFilm and the End o

Empire, ed. Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (London: Palgrave Macmillan,

2011), 27375, quotation on p. 274.60 Roland Barthes, quoted in Buckley, Objects o Love and Decay, 249.

61 Lazarus, Hating radition Properly, 12, 13.

62 Agnani, Hating Empire Properly, 18384.

Documents

Empires of Vision edited by Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy