Empires of Vision: A Reader ed. by Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy (review)

Empires of Vision: A Reader, explores, in the words of its editors Sumathi Ramaswamy and Martin Jay, “the range of pictorial practices, image-making technologies, and vision-oriented subjectivities that have been cultivated, desired, and dispersed within the context of modern empire formation and decolonization” (1). The raison d’etre of this volume, they state, is to “understand the ‘(post)colonial’ as among many competing ocular fields in the scopic regimes of modernity” (1–2). With this realization, we also realize that “no history of imperialism is complete without heeding the constitutive capacity of visuality, and correspondingly, no history of modern visuality can ignore the constitutive fact of empire” (11–12).

In the Introduction, Ramaswamy states that the contributions seek to illuminate the relationships between empire formation and image-making technologies, practices, and representations. In the process, the volume tracks how these relationships were “transformed through their entanglements in colonial and imperial projects” (2). The commonality that binds these disparate chapters is the understanding that visual practices and image-making are “objects of knowledge in and of themselves, as world making and world disclosing rather than merely world-mirroring” (12). As a consequence, the editors state that the subsequent chapters help us “consider empire formation as a messy business of mutual entanglements and imbrications” that moves beyond active colonialists and passive or resistant colonized paradigms (4).

The Reader contains twenty-one chapters from established scholars originating from a number of different fields. It is divided into two sections and five parts. Section One entitled “The Imperial Optics” is divided between studies on the materiality of painting, mass print, map-making, and photography and cinema. Section Two, “Postcolonial Looking,” contains chapters discussing how indigenes “speak back” to imperial and Orientalist visual productions and how the colonial returns to reconstitute European vision itself.

“The Imperial Optics,” provides us with an examination of how visual productions furthered the colonial project, albeit not cleanly or without tensions. Serge Gruzinski discusses the mass migrations of painterly images that accompanied and were interwoven with the Spanish colonization of Mexico. The Spanish created endless walls of frescos on churches (while tearing down native temples and icons). Gruzinski examines them to reveal the push and pull in the reorganization of seeing among the colonized, ways of seeing that were equally mediated through a native Indian painterly atelier. The view from Mexico is matched by the view of painterly production in Europe where botanical paintings were a means of visualization and conquest of the nature of the Spanish Americas (Daniela Bleichmar); the import of “Indian yellow” into the nineteenth-century British painterly palette reflected the anxiety that arises from racially representing colonial subjects and ruling them (Jordanna Bailkin); and, the proliferation of panoramas and dioramas (panoramania) of images from the Outre-mer in France disseminating a colonial aesthetic (and discourses) among a French public in unprecedented ways (Roger Benjamin).

The volume moves beyond the role of painting to the formation of colonial discourses and their images as sites of enactments and negotiations of power, subjugation, and resistance. The part entitled “Mass-Print Imperium” surveys the role of print as itself a new form of visual culture, which is often as ambivalent as it is imperious. Contributors Nicholas Thomas, Natasha Eaton, and David Ciarlo, respectively discussing the Pacific Islands/Oceania, India, and Germany (mostly, their holdings in Africa), reveal how colonial representations commute through and within print between the colony and the metropole, create colonial, racially-organized representations, and vacate cultural objects of their meaning and recontextualize them, often to unanticipated consequences.

What is useful about this diverse volume is that, without ignoring the politics of representation, it consistently returns to or roots itself in the materiality of the image and image-making — their practices, social relations, production, and circulation. In this regard, print production dovetails with cartography and map-making, starting with the dawn of the colonial era. Ricardo Padr...