let’s begin with a simple question: what is an empire if not an elaborate apparatus for making people visible in ways that render them controllable? the x-ray—a technology celebrated for its ability to illuminate the hidden—did not merely revolutionize medicine. it also perfected the logic of empire. beneath its cold fluorescence, the colonial subject was never just a body but a specimen, an object of surveillance, a site of extraction.
empires have always obsessed over visibility. from the panoptic gaze of prisons to the cartographic frenzy of colonial expansion, domination requires seeing—seeing the land, seeing the people, seeing their movements and, crucially, their secrets. but x-rays refined this obsession to an exquisite level: they didn’t just make the body visible; they made it transparent. the logic was as brilliant as it was sinister. why settle for crude bodily inspections when one could, quite literally, see through the skin?
the science of exposure: when light means power
science is never neutral. despite the myth that innovation marches forward untainted by ideology, history tells a different story. x-ray technology, heralded as a breakthrough in medical imaging, was equally instrumental in colonial policing. in the gold and diamond mines of africa, where vast fortunes were built on the backs of indigenous laborers, x-rays became the ideal weapon of control.
think about the absurdity of it: miners forced to submit to radiographic scans, their bodies reduced to ghostly outlines in search of smuggled diamonds. the colonial system never trusted its laborers—because it never saw them as laborers. they were subjects, tools, bodies that needed to be regulated and stripped of autonomy. swallowing a diamond became an act of defiance, a desperate attempt to reclaim what had been forcibly extracted. the response? to x-ray every miner before they left the compound, ensuring that not a single stolen gem could escape. in a world where wealth moved freely but people did not, the body itself became contraband.
vision as violence: the myth of technological progress
the promise of technology is always the same: it will liberate us. x-rays, we are told, advanced medicine, saved lives, and deepened our understanding of the human body. but whose lives did they save? whose bodies did they serve? medical progress, like every other form of progress under capitalism, has always been unevenly distributed.
it’s easy to marvel at the scientific brilliance of x-ray imaging. the way bones and tissues are rendered in haunting monochrome, the way fractures and foreign objects reveal themselves under its gaze. but it’s harder to reckon with its darker applications. for every patient whose broken limb was diagnosed, how many miners were irradiated against their will? for every surgeon who used x-rays to heal, how many colonial administrators used them to punish?
this is the paradox of technology: it is never just about innovation. it is also about domination. and the more seamless the technology, the easier it is to ignore the violence it enables.
from mines to airports: the afterlives of colonial vision
empires don’t just disappear; they mutate. the same logic that governed colonial labor camps now governs the modern airport. think of the full-body scanners that travelers must pass through, the invasive x-ray machines that render every detail of a person’s belongings visible. today, it is no longer diamond miners who are made to strip, but travelers from the global south. racial profiling, surveillance, suspicion—these are the afterlives of empire, repackaged for a neoliberal world.
consider the eerie parallels: a century ago, black african miners were subjected to x-rays to detect stolen diamonds. today, brown and black travelers are disproportionately pulled aside for “random” security screenings. the technology may have changed, but the logic remains the same. visibility as control. surveillance as security. exposure as a form of discipline.
unseeing empire: resisting the gaze
so where does that leave us? if seeing is an act of power, then resisting visibility must be an act of defiance. to be unseen, to move undetected, to refuse the state’s obsessive need to know—these are radical acts in an era of hyper-surveillance.
but there is another, more unsettling possibility: what if resistance requires not just hiding, but redirecting the gaze? what if the goal is not to disappear, but to force the empire to look at itself—to make it see its own violence, its own contradictions, its own fragility? because the truth is, every gaze can be turned back upon its observer. every x-ray, no matter how penetrating, can reveal things its user never intended to see.
technology does not exist outside of history. and history, no matter how deeply buried, always leaves a trace. the colonial dream of total visibility—the fantasy of knowing and controlling every subject—was always doomed to fail. for in the end, there is one thing no empire can ever fully see: its own undoing.
