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.

中文翻译：

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国际关系的种族视觉想象


视觉政治是国际关系 （IR） 的一个蓬勃发展的子领域，其起源可以追溯到世纪之交的“视觉转向”。然而，视觉政治几乎不涉及现代性的核心视觉性：种族。本文认为，视觉政治的历史比目前的学科历史所暗示的要长，它部署了社会学分析来探索种族差异的视觉政治在阐明构成 IR 的种族想象方面的核心作用。本文探讨了“全球差异的影子档案”，这是殖民地人民视觉分类的大规模项目，通过将殖民地人民与隐含的等级制度保持一致，困扰着随后的视觉生产项目，反过来又是阐明“全球差异”学说的核心，该学说构成了早期 IR 并仍然影响着其种族想象。这种干预相当于对视觉政治的预见及其围绕种族视觉的重新定位，以修正其学科想象并鼓励学术研究参与全球普遍存在的压迫性视觉。