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

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Jennifer Yee

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Abstract

While there has been relatively little serious analysis of colonial postcards, Malek Alloula's influential book Le 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. Copyright © SAGE Publications.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Yee J

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: French Cultural Studies

Year: 2004

Volume: 15

Issue: 1

Pages: 5-19

Print publication date: 01/02/2004

ISSN (print): 0957-1558

ISSN (electronic): 1740-2352

Publisher: Sage

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0957155804040405

DOI: 10.1177/0957155804040405

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