Empires of Vision: A reader ed. by Martin Jay, Sumathi Ramaswamy (review)

Historians of empire need to look closely. That is the message from the editors of Empires of Vision. Histories of empires are, they suggest, also histories of visualisation. Sight is critical to all kinds of imperial enterprise and experience (8). The essays, articles and chapters that comprise this collection—written by an impressive array of scholars—focus on exploring this powerful central idea. Taken together, the contributions consider how visual practices, ways of seeing and strategies of knowing have been deployed in conjunction with, and in support of, various European empires. And with that deployment, of course, there is also a variety of visual responses, reactions and acts of resistance which are also held up to scrutiny. These are not easy tasks: images are rich receptacles of meaning, but they also potentially participate in creating and buttressing regimes of physical and epistemological power. Nevertheless, Empires of Vision largely succeeds in making a persuasive case for paying careful attention to the key roles played by images and strategies of visualisation in imperialism, colonialism, anticolonialism and decolonisation.

That making this argument should be necessary in the first place can be attributed to the lingering sense of mistrust that many historians of empire exhibit when it comes to images, and there is some trenchant criticism reserved here for the text-dependent tunnel vision that can too often define histories and interpretations of empires. The editors note that the visual is often outside mainstream historical accounts of empire, imperialism and colonialism. Even when it is included, it often serves merely as a prop to illustrate a point. There is recognition of the limitations of postcolonial theory based on words and often articulated and analysed through literature. One of the doyens of postcolonial theory, Edward Said, is cited as admitting to being sent “into a panic” when confronted by images rather than words (5). Against this, then, Empires of Vision foregrounds the importance and salience of images in attempting to understand processes and experiences of empire.

The contributions collected here, it should be noted, have appeared in print before. As such, the collection comprises a snapshot of the “state of the field.” It presents its arguments on a broad canvas rather than attempting to answer a more focused question or to explore a more tightly related series of themes. This is no bad thing and, in any case, short introductions from the editors to the two main sections—“The Imperial Optic” and “Postcolonial Looking”—help to explain the selection and relate the various contributions to each other. The first part of the book explores relationships and entanglements between European empires and the power of vision. The second, and shorter, section shows how Europe appears from a (post)colonial vantage point. These themes are examined in contributions that range across many artists, countries and contexts and through a variety of media. They argue for a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the ways in which such images were deployed, how they interacted with and harnessed the agency of locals, and the ways in which specificities of place and context worked in practice. This collection will undoubtedly benefit students and their tutors in providing a carefully selected, wide-ranging and suitably eclectic collection of readings and interpretations of the ways in which art and empire have interacted over several centuries.

It is important to underline the fact that many of the contributions to this book are about ways of seeing and practices of knowing (or knowledge-making) just as much as they are about the history of art. Nevertheless, just as scholars of empires are enjoined to pay careful attention to images, the collection also has something to say to historians of art. Readers of this journal will be aware of the debates surrounding Said’s ideas on Orientalism. Similarly, Mary Louise Pratt’s work on the “imperial eye” will be familiar to many scholars of empire. But Sumathi Ramaswamy cites some fascinating data in which those involved in the visual...