Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Visual politics is a thriving subfield of international relations (IR) that traces its origin to the “visual turn” at the turn of the century. However, visual politics hardly engages with the central visuality of modernity: race. This article argues that visual politics has a longer history than the current disciplinary history suggests, and it deploys a sociographical analysis to explore the central role of the visual politics of racial difference in articulating the racial imaginary that frames IR. The article explores the “shadow archive of global difference,” the mass project of the visual taxonomization of colonial peoples that haunted subsequent projects of visual production by aligning them with an implicit hierarchy, and in turn was central to the articulation of the doctrine of “global difference,” which framed early IR and still influences its racial imaginary. This intervention amounts to a prevision of visual politics and its reorientation around racial visualities to revise its disciplinary imaginary and encourage scholarship that engages with the global prevalence of oppressive visualities.
DOI: 10.1093/ips/olaf008
Author: Yoav Galai
Institution: Royal Holloway University of London
Language: English
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $4,320
OpenAlex ID: W4409645266