The Imperial Gaze: Practices, Representations, and Identities in the Visual Archive

(1) The first part of this book presents five texts written by scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds which share a focus on traveling and/or tourism as a means of actively constructing identity and otherness in colonial contexts. The chapters analyze travel guides, albums, diaries, postcards, the press, film, and television as powerful media shaping empire, colonial culture, and (foreign) territories, where the visual takes center stage. Images were used as a means of domination and objectification, and served as conveyers of familiarity, identity, and otherness across geographies and what were perceived as cultural borders. It was not only the male but also the female gaze that was engaged in contrasting notions of Western civilization against untamed colonial landscapes, geographies and cultures. The different chapters address how (home) audiences were instructed on the way in which they should see, experience, and interpret the colonial project, its powerful interventions and hierarchical structure. (2) The second part of the book focuses on the gender of imperial imagery. Imagery of the female body – a powerful site of colonial and imperial conquest – gives rise to a collision between the cultural norms and practices of the colonized with the normalizing and stereotyped cultural codes of metropoles. The choices of the image taker, and the intent behind the taking of the image, lie principally with the colonizer. This interaction was often carried out by male stakeholders, privileged because of their power, yet their image taking unwittingly undoing the white male language of empire when viewers, as recipients, saw in these images disconnections around gender and culture – and even imperial malignancies created by the imposition of Western religion. Imposing the paradigm of gender on the imagery generated by empire, the chapters in this part of the book provide important perspectives about the intent and imperatives of empire. (3) The essays that make up the third part of this book deal with the imperial archive. Jeffrey Wallen (2023) recently described the last thirty years as “the era of the archive”: not only has there been a dramatic increase in the collection of documents and the establishment of archives, but the archive itself is now “one of the central topics of thought throughout the humanities,” appealing to a desire “to come in contact with the material of history” and, at the conceptual level, “to engage with the archive itself, both as an institution and as a constitutive and transformative force.” In some ways Wallen was echoing an earlier lecture by Stuart Hall (2025) in The Missing Chapter where he outlined his view that archives involve engaging in “a conversation between the past and the present”; they are a place of “activity and engagement” which must provoke people to think differently and ask new questions – otherwise they are “completely dead.” (4) Part four is dedicated to imperial looking and storytelling. Imperial visualities produced and were produced along narratives that told stories about the colonial and postcolonial experience. If “visual technologies and practices frequently underwrote colonial governance and power” (Ramaswamy 2024) , they did so within broader worldviews that gave meaning to the imperial experience, in both the metropole and the colonies. Most historiographies have not paid sufficient attention to the nexuses between empire and vision and have remained “dominated by the hegemony of the word and the tyranny of the textual archive” (ibid.). The focus on images should not neglect to consider how they were supplemented by histories about the self, the other, and the world. The chapters in this section analyze narratives about progress, humankind, war, and subalternity that were constitutive of the imperial gaze – some of them supposedly well-intentioned, some of them unabashedly exploitative, but in all cases never neutral in relation to the imperial regimes in which they were inscribed. (5) Part five of this volume concerns the journeys that visual studies can undertake over time – untrammeled by the written text and today’s strong epistemological boundaries when writing about colonial “others.” This is particularly in evidence when it comes to First Nations peoples of Australia. Images of them can convey false colonial impressions of “the other,” even when taken by the most sympathetic image-taker in past eras. First Nation Australians are often conveyed as “primitive,” with no written language and little recoverable “culture,” in images that are inescapably complicit with the eugenics of empire – unlike Brahmins in India, who are associated with their deep Sanskrit-based knowledge and written language. However, reconsidering these same images of First Australians through a contemporary lens, using separate theorizations, captures new meaning – reframed and contextualized to verify deeper knowledge garnered by new sociological, anthropological, and even psychological vistas that better, albeit still imperfectly, understand the consequences of unjust colonial dispossession. This final section reveals other dimensions as well. For people of color, “turning the camera on oneself” can be a means of reclaiming control of their identity. Although the camera and film might be used without any initial intention to convey meaning, yet meaning is recoverable in unintended ways by later generations when looking at these same images. Powerful revisions in messaging are also possible by placing images in a museum as part of new thematic exhibitions.