- To what extent were the global reaches of imperialism enabled, sustained, and resisted by particular images (of, for example, exoticism or Western domesticity)? How does the image help to ground and structure narratives of expansion, conquest, or assimilation? How have images served to confront or to resist the extension of these empires? In what ways were images deployed in struggles for home rule or decolonization? Do particular images indicate lines of continuity or fracture between the machinations of the old mpires and the new aims of global capitalism?

- To what extent do images shape and deform narratives of globalization and limn new maps of globality? The image is usually understood to unfold synchronically - "an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time," as Ezra Pound famously announced - but how might the image be understood to establish, modify, and reorient diachronic relations, especially within narratives of global capitalism and its others?

- What roles have images played in promoting nationalism in the colonial and postcolonial eras? How does an increasing movement toward globalization in a range of institutions challenge or affirm the aims of various nationalisms? To what extent do specific images of globalization and/or of the nation serve as sites of mutual affirmation or contestation?

- How have imagistic strategies in various media produced "the global" in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a new kind of "imagined community," in Benedict Anderson's phrase?