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

The Imperial Gaze: Practices, Representations, and Identities in the Visual Archive is a collection of essays by leading academics from around the world who study the colonial gaze in different empire settings. The key task undertaken by each author was to uncover new ways of looking at empire through the contemporaneous making and use of images, including photography. The essays in this volume uncover new geographies of colonial interaction, away from the simple binary of “colonizer” and “colonized”. They include: accounts of travel in empire and constructions of the exotic “other”; the projection of images that engage gender themes and Western religion; the archival building of colonial photographic imaging; imperial storytelling and a visual peering into colonial settings concerning problematic metropole-based philanthropy; and visual portrayals of first peoples who suffered and who were marginalized in colonial domains. This volume offers innovative vistas of empire that will enrich the work of scholars in this active academic field. They do this by providing vital cross-disciplinary alternative avenues of analysis based on the production and use of the image in imperial settings.