Visualizing Empire - Africa, Europe, and the Politics of Representation

Rebecca Peabody is head of Research Projects and Programs at the Getty Research Institute. Steven Nelson is the incoming dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, beginning July 2020. He was previously professor of African and African American art history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dominic Thomas is Madeleine L. Letessier Professor and chair of the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

"Visualizing Empire delves deeply into colonial image making and the difficult issues of conquest, race, media, and cultural stereotyping through a peerless collection of visual artifacts of colonial imagery. The authors frame these works within a multidisciplinary context that at once deepens, broadens, and enhances our knowledge of French colonialism and how it worked both in the metropole and in the complex geographical and cultural worlds in which the French were engaged. Through a close examination of these forms—architecture, mapping, dress, caricature, zoos, fairs, games, advertising, and localized sites of encounter, Visualizing Empire provides us a seat at the table to experience up close the ever expanding thirst of empire that shaped the modern world."—Suzanne Preston Blier, Allen Whitehill Professor of Fine Arts and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University;;“Visualizing Empire introduces a stunning archive, now at the Getty Research Institute, that will be a powerful addition to the study of art and visual culture of early twentieth-century French colonialism. Utilizing a diversity of artifacts—from toys to maps—the authors demonstrate the centrality of material culture in the Republic's imperial ambitions to build consensus at home and to justify its racial, political, and economic dominance in the countries that comprised its colonies. This groundbreaking anthology enacts the importance of rigorous collaborative scholarship as itself a subversive corrective to a past that continues to haunt the present.”—Kishwar Rizvi, Professor in the History of Art, Islamic Art and Architecture, Yale University