Illustrations ix

Reprint Acknowledgments xi

Acknowledgments xv

Introduction: The Work of Vision in the Age of European Empires / Sumathi Ramaswamy 1

Section I: The Imperial Optic

Introduction / Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy 25

Part 1: Empires of the Palette

1. The Walls of Images / Serge Gruzinski 47

2. Painting as Exploration: Visualizing Nature in Eighteenth-Century Colonial Science / Daniela Bleichmar 64

3. Indian Yellow: Making and Breaking the Imperial Palette / Jordanna Bailkin 91

4. Colonial Panaromania / Roger Benjamin 111

Part 2. The Mass-Printed Imperium

5. Objects of Knowledge: Oceanic Artifacts in European Engravings / Nicholas Thomas 141

6. Excess in the City? Consumption of Imported Prints in Colonial Calcutta, c. 1780-c. 1795 / Natasha Eaton 159

7. Advertising and the Optics of Colonial Power at the Fin de Siècle / David Ciarlo 189

Part 3. Mapping, Claiming, Reclaiming

8. Mapping Plus Ultra: Cartography, Space, and Hispanic Modernity / Ricardo Padrón 211

9. Mapping an Exotic World: The Global Project of Dutch Cartography, circa 1700 / Benjamin Schmidt 246

10. Visual Regimes of Colonization: European and Aboriginal Seeing in Australia / Terry Smith 267

Part 4. The Imperial Lens

11. The Photography Complex: Exposing Boxer-Era China (1900-1901), Making Civilization / James L. Hevia 283

12. Colonial Theaters of Proof: Representation and Laughter in the 1930s Rockefeller Foundation Hygeine Cinema in Java / Eric A. Stein 315

13. Colonialism and the Built Space of Cinema / Brian Larkin 346

Section II. Postcolonial Looking

Introduction / Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy 377

Part 5. Subaltern Seeing: An Overlap of Complexities

14. Speaking Back to Orientalist Discourse / Zeynep Çelik 395

15. Maps, Mother/Goddesses, and Martyrdom in Modern India / Sumathi Ramaswamy 415

16. Notes from the Surface of the Image: Photography, Postcolonialism, and Vernacular Modernism / Christopher Pinney 450

17. "I Am Rendered Speechless by Your Idea of Beauty": The Picturesque in History and Art in the Postcolony / Krista A. Thompson 471

18. Fanon, Algeria, and the Cinema: The Politics of Identification / Robert Stam 503

Part 6. Regarding and Reconstituting Europe

19. Creole Europe: The Reflection of a Reflection / Christopher Pinney 539

20. Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference / Simon Gikandi 566

21. Double Dutch and the Culture Game / Olu Oguibe 594

Conclusion. A Parting Glance: Empire and Visuality / Martin Jay 609

Contributors 621

Index 629