The Colonial Harem

by Malek Alloula

The Colonial Harem

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Photography, Feminism, Race, Gender, Africa

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

Reviews

[أميرة · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can see why Lazreg didn’t like this book. The women’s photos here are pornographic. Their bodies are objectified, their faces are in clear view and no attempt was made to conceal their identities. But the fact is that the French stripped Algerian women off, made them pose for the camera, and exchanged their photos –millions of them- among family and friends overseas. There is no way around that. Yes, reprinting these postcards will shock and disturb. But in order for humanity to move forward, France and the West need to fully acknowledge their colonial legacy and start working on serious reconciliation with the peoples they dehumanized. After all, the Auschwitz is only avoidable now because there are constant reminders of the ugly past all over Europe. Alloula’s book serves as a good reminder that women were, and still are, specifically being targeted by the liberating/civilizing/rescuing rhetoric that justifies violent imperialism. Harlow’s introduction, which opens with a haunting scene from Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, provides a concise background of the colonial history of Algeria and the debates in France over the Algerian resistance, labelled “terrorism” at the time.

[Mohammed Yusuf · Rating 3 out of 5]

مجموعة صور بريدية لنساء جزائريات عبر مصورين فرنسيين ، مع قراءة ثقافية لها في ضوء الكولونيالية و منظومة الحريم * النسوة المفصولات عن الرجال في الأزمنة العثمانية * ، الفكرة الأساسية انتحال الصورة لحقيقة موهومة وفق المخيال الكولونيالي للحريم من المنظور المركزي الأوروبي، حيث يراد بها عكس ايروسية منظومة الحريم والمرأة الجزائرية اتفاقا مع التخيل المسبق لها من قبل الفرنسيين ، فشلت هذه النظرة من عدة جوانب يبينها الكاتب الذي لديه فكرته المسبقة أيضا عن هذا التوهم ، المصور الذي يعد الاستوديو يستطيع تحضيره كما شاء و تنظيمه لكنه لا يستطيع دخول البيت الجزائري، المحاكاة التافهة التي يختلقها يحاول جعلها حقيقية أكثر من الحقيقة ، دلالتها الزائدة عن المدلول تجعلها كاذبة

قراءة الصورة عبر الآخرين محفزة للخيال أيضا باحتمالات جديدة ، ربما لو رأيتها اولا دون سياق القراءة لكان لدي تفكير مختلف

[Sevi · Rating 4 out of 5]

By looking at the colonial images of Algerian women depicted in the postcards between 1890-1930, Malek Alloula shows how photography produces knowledge of "the other" through the lens of the "photographer-voyeur." Many photographs including some pornographic material are taken by military officers during the conquest and circulated publicly within colonial economy of passion and exoticism. Colonizers take many photographs of colonized people, categorize them and focus on particular body parts, such as breast. No enough information is provided about the people. In fact, truth seems not important any more but the category itself becomes the truth even if it implies a wrong category. Alloula's striking example demonstrates that in one of those postcards, an Arab man is introduced as a Barber man because he has "typical" physical elements. In addition, these photographers freeze the moment so that the affect of the photograph makes one feel as if no evaluation is possible in a colonized society.

Alloula analyzes how the phantasy of Harem remains central defining the colonial desire. The colonizer's obsession of the erotic is embodied with Algerian women. Once forbidden, the women's world is now conquered and those photographs are considered the evidence of the victory over the colonized. Besides, the veiled, and thus inaccessible, women are described as imprisoned behind the grills of their houses' windows. Algerian women are mostly depicted as if they are waiting for the colonizers to be rescued from misery. Hence, Alloula's study has also strong contemporary resonances since liberating imprisoned women is still one of the premises of the Western war in North Africa.

[Conner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well-written book with devastating impact, especially the last few chapters. The Western eye will not feel too much about these images without their proper context, but what is witnessed is pure sexual violence in the colonial arena.

As Alloula says (in footnotes),

"Exoticism is always established by the gaze of the other."

"Colonialism is exoticism plus violence… the perfect expression of the violence of the gaze."

In reading this book, you become complicit in this violence, this indescribable psychosexual assault on the Algerian woman. Very difficult to finish, but damning in its consequences.

[Dan Gorman · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Algerian poet Malek Alloula protests the colonial legacy of France by examining the staged postcards French photographers took of Algerian Muslim women. These postcards were quite clearly staged, not real, and usually depicted Algerian women in invasive and highly sexualized ways. Writing in the sometimes opaque and always philosophical style of deconstructionism, Alloula examines the fantasies of the Orient conveyed in these photos, but with the larger goal of protesting the injustices the French perpetrated on Algerian women.

[Melissa Helton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Makes me want to investigate images of women used to represent various cultures... who makes the image and for whom etc. Very interesting discussion of colonialism, xenophobia, sexism, and the commodification of culture via postcards.

[Mohammed Amine BIAD · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the Colonial Harem, Malek Alloula attempted to remedy the inadequate representation of Algerian women by thoroughly examining the postcards taken by French photographers during the colonial era. He aimed to counteract the colonial narrative that, for long years, pictured Algerian women as sexual objects; imprisoned in Harems, topless, and sexually available for men and even other women. Alloula managed to sort his collection of postcards into sequences of similar elements (veiled women, topless women, women behind the caged windows…etc) to, first, prove that these arranged images are far from being unintentional but rather are part of colonial discourse. Second, to demonstrate that the postcard women are the French men’s fantasy of the imagined Oriental women.

[Finola Bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sooo good. Learned so much about French Algeria and the colonial nature of postcards

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

The harem is one of the central icons of Orientalist mythology, standing in for exoticism, eroticism and oppression, amongst other tropes and motifs. It occupies key places in art and literature, and Europe’s vision of North African and the Middle East. In this excellent, lavishly illustrated analysis, Alloula explores images of the North African harem in colonial era, mainly French sourced, postcards – the kinds of things we send friends and family as typical images of the places we visit. It is this status as postcard, as well as Alloula’s critical insider’s view, that makes this such a useful and insightful essay.

Alloula crafts his analysis around a number of strands exploring the idea of the harem as stereotypical imagining of North Africa, of the working of images that seem to look into the space to construct is as forbidden, as prison or as residence, at the place of the couple – same sex or not – in this form of Orientalist photography, and of ritual, performance and decoration. Throughout it is clear that Alloula’s case is an exploration not only of Orientalist and colonialist views of North African gender politics but of the construction of those views by commercial and artistic forces in the French colonial world; we see the same women in different poses, the same studio backdrops and so forth.

Little is known about the women in the images – but Alloula is compelling when he argues that they were almost certainly poor, maybe rural women who have moved to the cities, possibly sex workers; it is a believable and all too common condition.

The book was first published in 1981, with this English language version from 1986 but for the most part, the only thing that is dated is the bibliography; there has been some useful work done exploring the harem in art as well as analyses of postcards in gendered and other colonial settings. That does not however, undermine this excellent piece of social semiotic analysis that remains a significant contribution not only to analyses of Orientalism but also to analyses of colonial constructions of gender.

[Frederic · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice collection and analysis of early twentieth-century postcards of Algerian women.