In her first encounter with Annu Palakunnathu Matthew's photographic artwork, author Bakirathi Mani describes feeling an immediate sense of familiarity. Encased in glass, the images shared the “quality of snapshots that filled my own family albums,” Mani writes, “faded, in parts overexposed, each image depicting a cherished child and loving family” (1). A decade later, when Mani viewed the images again, she was startled to discover that these images were not family photographs at all but were surreal, digital collages. “No longer did [Matthew's images] produce a visual narrative of immigration that mapped onto and affirmed my childhood memories,” but they revealed themselves as fabrications narrating an artist's highly specific story of mourning. Unseeing Empire is interested in the disjuncture between that initial moment of identification and subsequent disorientation, exploring “how and why South Asian Americans desire to identify with photographic representations of diaspora” (4) and how and why those representations refuse to provide the “solace of identification” (7). Acknowledging that South Asian American representation is scarce and often distorted, Mani explores how photographic art, museums, and art exhibitions offer sites that promise the diasporic subject a sense of visibility and evidence of belonging (4). Yet Unseeing Empire argues that these mimetic modes of seeing, upon which diasporic viewers desire “an affirmation of ourselves” (4), are never straightforward, troubled by the institutional spaces in which they are encountered, haunted by the imperial archives that constitute them, and challenged by the artwork itself. Drawing from over a decade of research conducted between 2005 and 2018, including her work as an art curator, Mani examines the photograph-based works of three South Asian women artists – Seher Shah, Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, and Gauri Gill – alongside museum exhibits like the Smithsonian's Beyond Bollywood: Indian Americans Shape the Nation. What emerges is a rich and theoretically sophisticated study of South Asian diasporic visual art that not only questions what is at stake in the diasporic viewer's “desire to be represented” (7) but also examines the terms of diasporic subjectivity itself.

Mani coins the term “diasporic mimesis” to describe these visual encounters. As she explains, “diasporic mimesis structures the aesthetic practices of diasporic artists in relation to the archival image, as well as the relations of identification that the diasporic viewer establishes between herself and the archival object” (36). Indeed, in each chapter, Mani emphasizes the continued surfacing of the imperial archive in an artist's work and its display. In some examples, this is readily apparent: Annu Palakunnathu Matthew's series An Indian from India, for instance, openly references nineteenth-century salvage ethnography of Native Americans and obliquely indexes British-era colonial photography to reveal the “multiple genealogies of indigenous and imperial presence within the photographic print” (75). Mani also argues that the places where such artwork is displayed are also subject to forms of imperial haunting. In the Smithsonian's Beyond Bollywood: Indian Americans Shape the Nation, an exhibition housed at the National Museum of Natural History, Mani underscores the complicated feelings that emerge when such an exhibit is housed in a museum historically rooted in colonial epistemologies that naturalized the “science of race” (131–32). Attending the opening of the exhibition, Mani describes the simultaneous excitement of recognizing oneself as a subject within a larger diasporic and national assemblage while also being haunted by the uncanny sense of being turned into a racialized object, “of having seen oneself on display before” (120).

These themes are explored most powerfully in a chapter on Gauri Gill's The Americans. Taken between 2000 and 2007, Gill's photographs capture a diverse swathe of South Asian American life in spaces of work, worship, and home. Reading Gill's The Americans against Swiss photographer Robert Frank's canonical postwar images (also titled The Americans), Mani argues that what at first appears to be an “ethnographic” or “sociological” record of the heterogeneity of South Asian lives in the US betrays a more sophisticated aesthetic. In a series of incisive readings, Mani points our attention to the constant presence of “mirrors and mirrorlike objects” in Gill's images that rupture the “linear narrative of identification between [Gill] as an artist and those that she photographs” (170). This rupture also applies to the South Asian diasporic viewer who is first lured into a sense of familiarity by Gill's images only to have such mimetic identifications challenged. For Mani, this aesthetic strategy offers an alternative model of seeing, what she describes as a practice of “nonmimetic identification with the visual image” (16), which allows one to “refuse to inhabit the dominant modes of identification that are demanded of us by the neoliberal state” (11).

Unseeing Empire joins an exciting body of scholarship that examines the intersections of visual culture, racial formation, and affect. Building on recent visual studies scholarship of Nicole Fleetwood, Tina Campt, Elspeth H. Brown, and Thy Phu, among others, Unseeing Empire attends as much to the formal qualities of photographic art as to the affective experience of encountering it. In a political moment in which multicultural representation offers a simplistic solution to mounting racial inequality, Unseeing Empire asks us to pause and consider how “the problem of representation cannot be resolved through the greater visibility of the racialized subject” (12). In so doing, Mani still holds onto “the possibility that photography can restore a sense of selfhood to ourselves” (206), yet implores us to remember the colonial legacies of documentation, surveillance, and display that continue to haunt the images we hope to see.