Session Abstract

This panel brings together three historians of recent or forthcoming monographs on race and empire (Hapsburg Empire, British Empire, and Imperial Germany) to consider the relationship between the metropolitan public sphere and the formation of an imagined imperial community.  It draws upon, while interrogating, Benedict Anderson's concept of the "imagined community," which has received considerable play within studies of the nation but almost none in studies of empire.  The papers, covering three empires across contiguous time frames and overlapping territorial spaces, consider how metropolitan visual media negotiated and brought into being new connections to racial and ethnic others that had become subjects of these expanding European polities.  Molineux's paper explores how ordinary Britons in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries understood their connection to African slaves, focusing especially on the role of visual culture in shaping an emerging racial consciousness in Britain.  Johnson's paper examines the processes through which the visual icon of the culturally-conflated, uncivilized “Indian blackamoor” was created in the sixteenth-century Habsburg empire.  Ciarlo's paper considers the transformation in German imagery of Africans in ethnographic illustration and popular advertising at the fin de siècle.  These three polities, with imperial projects that differed in chronology, political contexts, and physical geography, all used forms of visual media to confront their different experiences of blackness.  This panel will therefore allow for a productive opportunity to compare how European countries negotiated and explained encounters with racial difference within the framework of imperial expansion.  These narratives of domestic and imperial subjectivity expand upon and refigure notions of an imagined community in the early modern and modern period, and highlight the centrality of race to the formation of European public spheres long before racial difference became a central, organizing feature of these societies.  We expect to draw audiences interested in early modern and modern imperialism, visual culture, African diaspora, and race.