ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the conventional historical and cultural approaches of visual literacy in relation to text-based discourses that explored the history of the British Empire. It considers theories of perception and visual priming when assessing recurrent modes of historicizing events and thematic strands within British imperial studies, alongside several key research questions that allow for the re-contextualization of celebrated as well as lesser-known imperial (and post-imperial) visual records, all media, as primary resources for new perspectives on the history of the British Empire. Case studies discussed in this theoretical framework, in which images traditionally had been used as illustrations of the history of the British Empire, are treated as insurgent visual narratives and grouped under five themes: ‘Mis-illustrated histories of the British Empire’, ‘Preserving the rhetoric of terror’, ‘Advertising imperial, racial, and gender dynamics, then and now’, ‘Visual framing and reversible social hierarchies’, and ‘Ongoing imperial visual currency’. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the crucial role played by recent developments in visual research methods employed by cultural, visual, social, and anthropological studies while encouraging innovative cross-disciplinary regimes of knowledge informing renewed perspectives on the history of the British Empire.
