Unseeing Empire: Photography, Representation, South Asian America (a Camera Obscura book)

In Unseeing Empire Bakirathi Mani examines how empire continues to haunt South Asian American visual cultures. Weaving close readings of fine art together with archival research and ethnographic fieldwork at museums and galleries across South Asia and North America, Mani outlines the visual and affective relationships between South Asian diasporic artists, their photographic work, and their viewers. She notes that the desire for South Asian Americans to see visual representations of themselves is rooted in the use of photography as a form of colonial documentation and surveillance. She examines fine art photography by South Asian diasporic artists who employ aesthetic strategies such as duplication and alteration that run counter to viewers' demands for greater visibility. These works fail to deliver on viewers' desires to see themselves, producing instead feelings of alienation, estrangement, and loss. These feelings, Mani contends, allow viewers to question their own visibility as South Asian Americans in U.S. public culture and to reflect on their desires to be represented. Read more Continue reading Read less REVIEW
"Bakirathi Mani demands that we expand the geographic and temporal frame through which to grasp South Asian American representation so that we can engage with the processes of U.S. settler colonialism and racialization. Unseeing Empire makes an outstanding contribution to Asian American and South Asian diaspora and visual culture studies." -- Gayatri Gopinath, author of, Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora

"Beautifully written, meticulously crafted, and combining powerful personal reflection with rigorous scholarship, Unseeing Empire brings various sets of photographic archives and practices of the early twenty-first century into conversation, from fine art photography and vernacular images to ethnographic pictures. This impressive book makes a vital contribution to several fields, including contemporary art and visual culture studies, museum and curatorial studies, postcolonial theory, and Asian American and American studies." -- Nicole R. Fleetwood, author of, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration

"Unseeing Empire joins an exciting body of scholarship that examines the intersections of visual culture, racial formation, and affect.... [It] implores us to remember the colonial legacies of documentation, surveillance, and display that continue to haunt the images we hope to see." -- Manan Desai, Journal of American Studies ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bakirathi Mani is Professor of English Literature at Swarthmore College and author of Aspiring to Home: South Asians in America. Read more Continue reading Read less