The colonial harem

This provides a commentary on images, specifically on a series of French postcards depicting mainly eroticized "scenes from Algerian life" under colonial rule during the first three decades of this century (which Alloula calls the "Golden Age of the colonial postcard"). The aim is to address, to some extent create, a new audience, one capable of seeing through the immediate scene of the images in order to view the machinery of colonialism at work, behind the scene. Edward Said has cited The Colonial Harem as an "excellent example" of the kind of post-colonial text that "open[s] the [Western] culture to experiences of the Other which have remained 'outside' (and have been repressed or framed in a context of confrontational hostility) the norms manufactured by 'insiders' and that "[t]he pictorial capture of colonized people by colonizer" is made intelligible for an audience of modem European readers" ("Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community"). This view, by no means unanimous,) is nonetheless roughly accurate in at least its most general point: Alloula does intend to bring the "outside" closer to the "inside" and, in doing so, to reverse the distinction by presenting not only a critique of political "capture," but a counter-image of resistance as well.