William A. Callahan's Sensible Politics extends the growing field of visual international relations (IR) by arguing that, beyond images, politics should be approached as a “multisensory performance” that viscerally constitutes “affective communities of sense” (pp. xi, 2). Joining a robust conversation about the centrality of the visual in global affairs, Callahan draws on his experience as an IR and China scholar, filmmaker, and student of garden design to explore alternative theoretical footholds and methodologies for engaging sensory and sensible politics around the world.
The book is framed by the assumption that visuality matters for fields like IR, political science, and Asian studies, but that it matters differently than much current research imagines. These assumptions are grounded in a productive distinction between visibility and visuality, in which the former centers on what images mean and the latter on what they do. What matters for Callahan is that problems of representation or visibility alone are insufficient to grasp the complexity of spatial politics. That is, beyond ideological readings of texts, or the simple expansion of the archive, where IR scholars can now turn their attention to photographs, comics, films, TV programs, social media posts, and the like, the study engages visuality as a “political and moral performance, in which people actively visualize the world they want to live in, as well as the societies they don't want to see and feel” (p. 2). In short, visual artifacts “can have their own agency” and be “world-ordering” (pp. 19, 39). To establish this orientation, the book is organized into three parts: (1) frameworks for analyzing “Visibility/Visuality”; (2) attention to existing debates about “Visual Images” in IR; and (3) explorations of how “Visual Artifacts and Sensory Spaces” contribute to sensible politics today.
Callahan's study directly addresses an interdisciplinary IR readership, especially those interested in building on IR's aesthetic and visual “turns.” For this audience, the book provides a useful survey of the literature, probes key conceptual debates, and experiments with methodologies in a range of case studies, such as in chapter 7, “Maps, Space, and Power.” The opening chapters explore conceptualizations of visual agency, affect, and what Jacques Rancière terms “distributions of the sensible”—an idea borrowed for the title the book. The latter describes the “aesthetic regimes” or conditions of possibility that “determine the place and stakes of politics as a form of experience” (pp. 36–37).
In the second part of the book, Callahan draws out the implications of these sensible politics for existing debates in the field, including his experience as a filmmaker (chapter 4), securitization theory (chapter 5), and problems related to ethical witnessing (chapter 6). Chapter 6, in particular, engages Ai Weiwei's 2017 documentary Human Flow as a site of popular and visual resistance “that can mobilize transnational affective communities” (p. 118).
The contribution of Sensible Politics is most clearly developed in part three, where, across five chapters, Callahan examines visuality as constitutive of multisensory spaces and material agencies (including complex and provocative engagements with maps, veils, walls, gardens, and cyberspace). This range of examples highlights the book's comparative focus on political phenomena from East Asia, the Middle East, and the North Atlantic, as well as its stated ambition not simply to replace Eurocentrism with Sinocentrism, but rather “to explore visual international politics through an assemblage of concepts that are Chinese, Asian, Western, traditional, contemporary” (p. 55). Indeed, this interest in taking non-Western examples as theory and method, and not simply data, is key to the book's reorientation of the international. Chapter 7, for example, examines how maps “can creatively perform—and not merely represent—world orders” (p. 149), focusing on how early modern maps of the Chinese empire continue to exert pressure on Beijing's interventions in the South China Sea, among other sites. These visual interventions both “provoke particular affective communities of sense” but also complicate simplistic ideas about East and West, colonizer and colonized, by tracing how Qing-era China was both a victim of Western imperialism and itself a colonial empire (pp. 176, 55).
Expansive, provocative, and clearly written, Sensible Politics will appeal to a wide range of scholars interested in comparative political theory, Asian and global studies, and visual and media cultures. As an interloper in IR, I am struck by parallels with Asian media studies research—including a focus on aesthetics, spatial practice, affective geographies, and so on—but also distinctions. Questions of media and mediation, for example, are resonant but largely absent here. When they do appear, it is to name objects or industries rather than to think about the complex ways that media form the infrastructural basis for experience. While partly a matter of terminology and disciplines, such gaps are also suggestive of the potential for future engagements with global media and sensory politics, including those in and about Asia.
