ABSTRACT
The chapter examines the global empires and contemporary dominant regimes of visuality are both mutually constitutive and disrupted within. It engages and extends theorizations of visuality-the contingent and ephemeral structures of desire, difference, history, lived experience, and memory-to show the tensions between slavery and colonial projects in the present. They are 'border zones dividing and connecting the inside and outside'. Tausig argues that normative readings of the face constitute: In discussions of spectatorship in her work on film and viewing, Mary Ann Doane posits an equation between women viewers and visual images, whereby the latter define the former. Taking seriously the idea that images are rife with epistemologies that do not recognize some subjects as bodies or legitimate agents of world politics can provide an important counterpoint to existing commonsense insights of terror, turning our attention to emergent politico-economic and ontological relationships in the context of globalization.
