Victorian Studies

This article presumes that recent debates about the nature of reading take implicit positions on the corporate university’s project of replacing critical with instrumental reason. In response it argues for a “curatorial” approach to historical objects, one predicated on a relation of care that is intrinsic (aimed at cultural objects themselves) and extrinsic (aimed at critiquing the violence such objects necessarily mediate). Three photographs by Felice Beato stand as test cases: via the trope of prosopopoeia, or displacement, these images are held to perform the conceptual activity most often ascribed to (later) critics. Seen curatorially, Beato’s dynamic images enable us (in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s terms) to be reparative in reading them but properly paranoid about the ongoing work of empire.