Colonial Harem (Theory and History of Literature) by Alloula Malek

Author:Alloula, Malek [Alloula, Malek]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2011-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

Scenes and types. Family in front of their house.

Scenes and types. Young couple from the South.

Scenes and types. The Lovers.

At a time when mass media do not yet exist, the postcard fills the gap and adds its “inspired” chatter to colonialist discourse. Moreover, it provides it with a custom-made iconography, replete with pious and worthy intentions. It is an illustrated breviary.

For its part, the postcard on p. 43 contributes to the same end but, this time, in a valorized mode. The couple represented here is in the process of mutating; it is miraculously saved; in other words, it is a couple already visited by the blessings of civilization: it has been the recipient of divine grace. The young horseguard (or rifleman) in full uniform may indeed hold his companion amorously because he partakes in the colonial order and has thus extricated himself from the ambient barbarism. He stands confident and assured; he smiles at the future. His companion, dressed and adorned as richly as it is possible to be, confirms this irresistible social climb. which is offered here as a dazzling model. The absence of progeny lets us conclude that the postcard depicts a good management of sexuality, one way of reaching the heights promised by civilization.

A comparison of the two postcards on pp. 42 and 43 yields a sort of dream of the colonial ideology that could be formulated as follows: sterilize and castrate the couple in order to have it conform to the status of a true colonized couple.

One can see here one of the dreadful apprehensions of any establishment of colonial dominion over alien populations: sooner or later the native birthrate will threaten, with its rapid growth, the future of the colony. The postcard, in addressing this theme, attempts an absurd and imaginary conjuration of the inexorable movement of history, a movement it resolutely ignores in order to concentrate on a present that it is busy counterfeiting.

To the photographer and his clientele at least, the representation of the couple remains a relatively neutral and harmless subject inasmuch as the ethnographic alibi can be invoked to conceal the hidden meaning.

But the postcard is a naive “art” that rests, and operates, upon a false equivalency (namely, that illusion equals reality). It literally takes its desires for realities.

Its desires are, first and foremost, those of the photographer, and among them the absolute necessity of the harem as imaginary figure and phantasmic site is well known. And so, it is to be expected that it will manifest itself in this theme as well.

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