QUESTIONING COLONIAL PHOTOGRAPHY Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India by Zahid Chaudhary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Pp. 272, 74 black-and-white photos, 13 color plates. $90.00 cloth, $30.00 paper.Zahid Chaudhary's Afterimage of Empire treats relationship between photography and colonialism, and present and past, encouraging its readers to meditate on questions rather than providing answers. Chaudhary poses critical questions about epistemology, ontology, evidence, value, and objectivity, extensively interweaving theoretical ruminations by seminal thinkers of modernity with close analyses of historical materials. This book will become one of a key group of challenging texts against which scholars of photography, modernity, and postcolonialism will need to locate their own work. In this regard, Afterimage of Empire establishes itself as a productive interface for scholars of photography across different regional specialties and cultural foci.Chaudhary's methodology stresses deployment of phenomenological elements as backbone of his argument. Recent work on colonial photography relies heavily-in fact, almost exclusively-on Foucauldian readings, analyzing dichotomic and hierarchical relationships between photographed subjects and photographer, as Chaudhary establishes in his introduction. Dissenting from this common approach, Chaudhary opts to mobilize and senses as negotiating conduits between images and viewers, allowing him to move beyond now-familiar power-knowledge of colonial photography.Chaudhary's work shares similar methodological convictions with other body-focused analyses of Euro-American nineteenthcentury visual culture-Jonathan Crary's Techniques of Observer (1990), for instance-in which the body is identified as heightened site of negotiation for transforming visuality through various apparatuses, including photography. But this book also breaks from its precedents when Chaudhary casts a much broader net, both geographically and temporally.Indeed, Afterimage of Empire does not limit itself to production of photographic images in nineteenth-century India or to their reception within British Empire. Rather, Chaudhary is invested in articulating connections between images and their viewers (to whom he sometimes refers as spectators) through particular attention to related experiences between images' representation of bodily affects and sensations and those of viewers. The word afterimage used in title aptly captures author's intent: Chaudhary pursues subsequent, belated illusionary sensations evoked by seeing photographs of nineteenth-century India. This book, in this light, can be seen as testament to his continued effort to affix afterimages left on his eyelids onto pages themselves.In his own words, this book attempts] to provide a narrative of colonial representations that is no ni co nophobic (31) and seeks to work against notions of surface and depth, by reading 'surfaces' and 'appearances' as themselves constitutive of critique (32). Chaudhary questions all-too-comfortable habitual readings of colonial photography in order to examine very political processes by which viewing habit itself is formed. This book, then, concern[s] itself with practice of making sense, but also it refers to 'the composing sense,' or mimetic faculty, capacity that underwrites means by which experience becomes commu table, framed, and transmuted (35). Using what he calls the rhetorical powers of medium, Chaudhary considers samples of colonial images that range from ethnographic and journalistic to landscape and missionary propaganda materials. His interpretations of these images are governed by emotive concepts such as faith and contamination (chapter 1), phantasmagoric aesthetic of fear and violence (chapter 2), picturesque and reproducibility (chapter 3), and sympathy and affect (chapter 4). …