The question of race is often approached as an epistemological problem, predicated on readings and representations of visible differences, such as ‘hair type, nose shape and skin colour’ (Alcoff 2002: 14). On this account, race is understood discursively, as ‘an ideology, a narrative’ (Saldanha 2006: 9). Importantly, in this line of inquiry, the seemingly neutral act of seeing is subjected to scrutiny. The practices of visual representation – ‘the King of the senses’ (Braidotti 2011: 107) – are considered to be crucial to the genesis of the modern human subject. For example, in her analysis of ‘the process of speciation’, Megan H. Glick argues that visual representation as a form of ‘ocular anthropomorphism’ entails ‘the dualistic movement between processes of racialisation and speciation’ (2012: 99). Similarly, drawing on a Foucauldian conceptualisation of the ‘Classical episteme’, Linda Martin Alcoff notes that Western fetishistic classifying practices which delineate and differentiate natural terrains and types, such as map-making and table-drawing, emerged simultaneously with the ‘metaphysical and moral hierarchies between racialised categories of human beings’ (2002: 13).

In reconfiguring what is taken as self-evidently visual in racialised and anthropocentric perceptual practices, the above accounts provide strong critiques against an ‘ocular consciousness’ (Glick 2012: 99), characteristic of the sovereign and disembodied human subject, coded as white and masculine. Moreover, the immediacy of phenotypes is now considered ‘a produced obviousness’ (Alcoff 2002: 14). In other words, the direction of essentialism's logic of causality is reversed, so that the visible racial differences are understood as the result of, rather than the cause and justification for, various forms of racism.

And yet we should not be surprised that, despite such interrogations, the visual registry continues to function as a powerful determinant, mediating everyday racialised encounters. As Alcoff writes,