Social Science Research Council

2009 DPDF Research Field:
Empires of Vision

“Empires of Vision” proposes that global empires and modern regimes of visuality were mutually implicated, and even in important ways constitutive of each other. What specific visual practices and technologies did modern empires cultivate and desire? In turn, how were these transformed through their entanglement in empire building?  With a comparative focus on the British and French empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we will explore imperial visual practices related to history and landscape painting; photography; commercial and documentary film; maps and scientific drawings; political prints and advertisements; and object collection, museums and international exhibitions, to understand how the production, circulation, and reception of images fundamentally shaped imperial sovereignty and power. We will also analyze postcolonial deployments of such practices to understand if and how imperial visual imaginaries and techniques are recast and challenged, as well as linger on in Europe’s former colonies. Not least, we will interrogate existing theories of the work of vision through the optic of global imperialism, so as to map the contours of post-colonial reconceptualizations of visuality.

This research field stands at the crossroads of two of the most vibrant interdisciplinary fields in contemporary humanist and social scientific scholarship: colonial and post-colonial studies and visual culture. Both transcend national boundaries and are comparative in their approach. Both focus on issues of power, subjectivity (and subjectification), and the intertwining of culture and the body. Both draw on a wealth of materials that have traditionally been marginal to mainstream scholarship. And both are still maturing in ways that are not easy to predict.  In the workshops we will explore visual regimes as comprising actors and artifacts, practices of looking and ideologies of sight, all articulated in complex networks that are in turn intertwined in the political and symbolic economies of colonial and postcolonial global cultures.  Our emphasis will be on visual flows, hybridity, and interconnectedness that will not privilege one center (i.e. Europe) over others, even as we seek to demonstrate the conceptual virtues of adopting a poly-centric approach that attends to the co-existence of multiple forms, uneven temporalities, and plural ways of seeing and being seen.

We invite students who are interested in participating in trans-disciplinary and comparative conversations about the image and the visual from a wide array of disciplines including anthropology, art history, architectural studies, critical theory, film studies, history, literary and cultural studies, and sociology. Rather than force a uniform methodology on a field where the rule is still eclectic experimentation, we want to be true to the still evolving dynamic of the subject and work with students towards developing particular approaches to the specific questions their work seeks to answer.