Recycling the 'Colonial Harem'? Women in postcards from French Indochina

Journal article

Abstract:: While there has been relatively little serious analysis of colonial postcards, Malek Alloula's influential bookLe Harem colonial put forward a reading of such postcards from the early 1900s as perpetuating a harem fantasy through which French male colonists viewed North Africa. This article analyses a selection of postcards of women from France's Indochinese colonies at the same period, and suggests that Alloula's thesis does not fit them in a comparable way. The Indochinese postcards borrow frames of reference from pre-existing pictorial styles, taken sometimes from the harem but also from chinoiserie and contemporary European photographic portraiture; rather than portraying a single vision of the 'Other' they oscillate between showing the Indochinese woman as 'same' and 'different'. And these images appear to have been addressed primarily to a female collector, suggesting an intended reading rather removed from Alloula's vision of colonial postcards as pornography.

Language:: English
Keywords:: orientalism

colonialism

photography

Indochina

harem

postcards

women
Subjects:: History
UUID:: uuid:8e261339-ae15-4330-9402-2b3658802ea6
Local pid:: ora:4838
Deposit date:: 2011-01-21

Copyright holder:: SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Notes:: The full-text of this article is not currently available in ORA, but you may be able to access the article via the publisher copy link on this record page. The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in French Cultural Studies, 15(1), February 2004 by SAGE Publications Ltd. All rights reserved. © 2008 SAGE Publications. N.B. Dr Yee is now based at the the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages Undergraduate Studies, University of Oxford.

Licence:: Terms and Conditions of Use for Oxford University Research Archive

If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record