In 1993, when Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease criticized the absence of cultural analysis in studies of US imperialism, it gave rise to a burgeoning field of scholarship exploring the role of cultural production in the service of, or in opposition to, imperialist policies. Visualizing American Empire makes a valuable contribution to this literature, generating new readings of how American imperial imagery surrounding the US occupation of the Philippines intervened in turn-of-the-century debates about race, empire, and nation. David Brody casts his net broadly in his selection of texts, which he terms “visual scapes” – including photographs, press illustrations, parades and other public spectacles, interior design, material culture, maps, and architecture – to examine the rising cultural and political importance of the Orient in the way that Americans imagined and reimagined themselves through the images they produced and consumed.

The creative power of Brody's argument lies in his meticulous visual analysis of the racialized and sexualized representations of Filipinos and orientalism in American culture and the contested, even contradictory, meanings they could evoke. In chapter 1, Brody examines the travel writings and souvenirs of Charles Longfellow, the son of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in his trips to Asia in the early 1870s. From examining Longfellow's photographs to his body tattoos, Brody traces the early manifestations of his central claim of the book, the growing cultural fascination with orientalism in late nineteenth-century American culture that propelled the nation into imperial pursuit of the Philippines. In chapter 2, Brody moves beyond the realm of a private collector to the wider adoption of orientalist motifs in American decorative arts put forth by the popular magazine Art Amateur. In the second half of the book, he examines how other visual media, including maps of the Philippines and the imperial spectacle of Admiral George Dewey's homecoming parade, reshaped mass cultural imaginings of the Philippines in order to rationalize imperial acquisition after the Spanish–American War of 1898. This symbolic appropriation of the Orient is perhaps best exemplified by the book's culminating example, President William Howard Taft's interior redesign of the White House in 1900 using an orientalist aesthetic.

With each chapter oriented around a different “visual scape,” Brody brings to the table an array of analytical tools to explore potential meanings. Each chapter stands on its own to encapsulate different ways that Americans redefined themselves in relation to the imperial project. The drawback of this organizational approach, however, is that the impact and interconnections of these representations can be difficult to ascertain, particularly since the audiences of these texts ranged widely, from private use to mass circulation.

In a cogently written and richly illustrated narrative, Brody succeeds in collapsing the distant world of overseas imperialism with the visual landscape surrounding the lives of ordinary American consumers. This process of “domesticating the Orient,” as Brody puts it (29), helped to establish a cultural climate by which Americans could justify and take pleasure in US expansion in the Far East.