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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Empires of Vision: A Reader ed. by Martin Jay and Sumathi Rawaswamy Carmen J. Nielson Jay, Martin and Sumathi Rawaswamy (eds.) – Empires of Vision: A Reader. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. 688. Empires of Vision: A Reader is a collection of twenty-one essays written by some of the most important scholars presently working at the intersection of visual culture and post-colonial studies. These essays, combined with masterly introductions by the editors, Sumathi Ramaswamy and Martin Jay, offer an exceptional initiation into thinking through the visual turn vis-à-vis modern European imperialism. As the editors point out, these two concerns have developed largely in isolation from one another. Visual studies scholars have tended to neglect colonialism, while colonial and post-colonial scholarship has paid scant attention to visual culture. Bringing these research areas into the same analytical field, the editors suggest, enables “new configurations and reordering of received knowledge” about both visuality and imperialism (p. 2). This compilation emerged out of a 2009 workshop funded by the Social Science Research Council’s Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship, which brought together doctoral students from a broad range of disciplines to work with Ramaswamy and Jay. The workshop’s purposes were to delineate the contours of existing scholarship located at the nexus of visuality and empire, as well as foster new developments in the field. The essays are excerpted from scholarship published, with one exception, since 2000 and covers spatial and temporal contexts spanning the globe over five centuries. The authors work from diverse disciplinary locations, including African-American Studies, Art History, Architecture, Anthropology, History, English, Spanish, and Women’s Studies. The collection’s breadth is matched by its depth; the essays are insightful, sophisticated, and most framed explicitly within continental philosophy, post-modern, and/or post-colonial theory. Although Latour and Bhabha loom largest, [End Page 818] Said, Fanon, W.J.T. Mitchell, Barthes, and Lacan are frequently cited, as is the work of influential figures like Anderson, Taussig, and Appadurai. Fundamentally, the collection is an incitement to scholars to treat empire and vision as mutually constitutive and to foreground visual subjectivities’ implication in and entwinement with power/knowledge (p. 4). It is also a challenge to the Western canon’s “entrenched antivisualism” and a critique of post-colonial theory’s privileging of textuality (p. 5). In her introduction, Ramaswamy explains that the way forward requires a radical re-conceptualization of visual practices “as objects of knowledge in and of themselves, as world-making and world-disclosing, rather than merely world-mirroring” (p. 12). In the same vein, Christopher Pinney, in his essay “Creole Europe,” argues that scholars will need “to develop new languages which…articulate pathways that will allow objects and material practices to manifest their own primary role as instantiations of significance…, rather than being subjugated as the expression of some higher order of meaning whose primary form is located elsewhere” (p. 561). This epistemological shift and its promise of new insights are manifested impressively by the collection’s essays. The first section, “Imperial Optic,” introduces scholarship that, taken together, traces out “the lineaments of an optical theory of colonial power” (p. 2). These essays ask how European empires were implicated in images’ production, consumption, dispersal, accumulation, and collation. They examine how image-making technologies, such as paintings, prints, maps, photographs, and films are transformed through their peregrinations between the metropole and colonies. The essays challenge the notion that these transformations simply produced tools of repression or of resistance. Rather, the life courses of imperial imagery reveal what Ramaswamy describes as “a messy business of mutual entanglements and imbrications, of collisions and compromises, and of desiring-while-disavowing and disavowing-while-desiring” (p. 4). The second section, “Postcolonial Looking,” is composed of scholarship that supplements Spivak’s epochal query “Can the subaltern speak?” with the question: “Does the empire not only speak and write back but also look back in unexpected ways, and at whom and with what effect?” (p. 3). In these essays, the colonial image-worker makes Europe the object of regard and turns the imperial eye back upon itself. It is the strength of these essays’ epistemological and theoretical frameworks...