Malek Alloula: The Colonial Harem (1981/1986)

“Malek Alloula takes the everyday object of postcard and shows how it was a classic locus of Orientalism, which has long been a phantasm of the West: ‘There is no phantasm, though, without sex and in this Orientalism .. a central figure emerges, the very embodiment of the obsession: the harem’. In Arabic, harim means forbidden and thus also refers to the women’s quarters of many Islamic households, which are forbidden to strange men. Embroidering from four centuries of stories concerning the Imperial harem in Istanbul, however, the Western imagination had transformed every harem into a hotbed of sensuality and sexuality. France colonized Algeria in 1830, an operation documented at the time by the artist Eugène Delacroix and later depicted by countless Orientalist artists, led by figures like Horace Vernet and Eugène Fromentin. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the fine art genre of the odalisque, or Oriental nude, was displaced by a flood of popular postcards depicting the algérienne, the Algerian woman.

Alloula, himself Algerian, studied this mass of now-discarded visual material in his classic study The Colonial [Harem] in which he wants to ‘return this immense postcard to its sender’, the French colonizer. He shows how the veiled Algerian woman was a provocation to the European photographer as her light clothing produced a ‘whiteout’ in the bright sun, a technical failure of the photograph to register strong differences of light and dark. The women’s peephole gaze from behind the veil recalls the photographer’s own gaze from behind the cloth of a tripod camera of the period and in a sense ‘the photographer feels photographed .. he is dispossessed of his own gaze‘. The response is to remove the obstacle to the gaze–to obliterate it, in Terry Smith’s terms–by raising the veil: ‘he will unveil the veil and give figural expression to the forbidden’. Thus from the seemingly innocent postcards showing a woman slightly lifting her veil to the popular image of a half-naked Algerian woman, there is hardly a step. The colonial gaze must see and make an exhibition of these women, which is then rendered as the aesthetic. The erotic effect, such as it is, is beside the point in this operation of colonial visualism.” (from Nicolas Mirzoeff, Visual Culture Reader, 2002, pp 475-476)

Originally published as Le Harem Colonial: Images d’un sous-érotisme, Editions Slatkine, Geneve-Paris, 1981
Translated by Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich
Introduction by Barbara Harlow
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1986
Theory and History of Literature series, Volume 21
ISBN 0719019079, 9780719019074
160 pages

review (Gregory K. Betts, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature)
review (Carlos Shloss, The New York Times)
review (Arlette Gautier, Les Cahiers du CEIMA, in French)
commentary (Jean-Noël Ferrié & Gilles Boëtsch, Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord)

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Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung (1/2010) – Kulturtechnik [German]

Seit der Antike schließt das europäische Verständnis von Kultur die Vorstellung ein, daß Kultur technisch konstituiert ist. Schon im Wort ‘Kultur’ (lat. colere, cultura) steckt insofern ein eminent technischer Sinn, als mit cultura die Entwicklung und praktische Anwendung von Techniken zur Urbarmachung des Bodens und zur Besiedelung der Erde mit Wohnsitzen und Städten gemeint ist. Noch im 19. Jahrhundert wäre ein Konzept namens “Kulturtechnik” daher ganz selbstverständlich innerhalb der Agrar- oder Geowissenschaften angesiedelt worden.

Innerhalb der medienkulturwissenschaftlichen Diskussion, in die der Begriff heute eingerückt ist, bezeichnen “Kulturtechniken” dagegen Praktiken und Verfahren der Erzeugung von Kultur, die an der Schnittstelle von Geistes- und Technikwissenschaften ansetzen und als Bedingung der Möglichkeit von Kultur überhaupt begriffen werden. Dieses technische Verständnis von Kultur bricht mit der bildungsbürgerlichen Tradition des 19. Jahrhunderts, die unter Kultur die Sphäre der hohen Kunst, der Bildung und des guten Geschmacks verstand. Das Konzept ist nicht auf die sogenannten elementaren Kulturtechniken (Lesen, Schreiben, Rechnen) beschränkt, sondern beinhaltet auch die Techniken des Körpers, Repräsentationsverfahren und andere Medientechniken.

Mit Beiträgen von Jacques Aumont, Eva Geulen, Marta Braun, Louise Merzeau, André-Georges Haudricourt, Michael Cuntz, Erhard Schüttpelz, Harun Maye, Wolfgang Schäffner, Bernhard Siegert, Cornelia Vismann, Manfred Schneider, Susan Leigh Star.

Edited by Lorenz Engell and Bernhard Siegert
Publisher Felix Meiner, Hamburg
ISBN 9783787319510
228 pages

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See also Cultural techniques at Monoskop wiki

Jacques Derrida: Athens, Still Remains: The Photographs of Jean-François Bonhomme (1996/2010)

“Athens, Still Remains is an extended commentary on a series of photographs of contemporary Athens by the French photographer Jean-François Bonhomme. But in Derrida’s hands commentary always has a way of unfolding or, better, developing in several unexpected and mutually illuminating directions.

First published in French and Greek in 1996, Athens, Still Remains is Derrida’s most sustained analysis of the photographic medium in relationship to the history of philosophy and his most personal reflection on that medium. At once photographic analysis, philosophical essay, and autobiographical narrative, Athens, Still Remains presents an original theory of photography and throws a fascinating light on Derrida’s life and work.

The book begins with a sort of verbal snapshot or aphorism that haunts the entire book: “we owe ourselves to death.” Reading this phrase through Bonhomme’s photographs of both the ruins of ancient Athens and contemporary scenes of a still-living Athens that is also on its way to ruin and death, Derrida interrogates a philosophical tradition that runs from Socrates to Heidegger in which the human—and especially the philosopher—is thought to owe himself to death, to a certain thought of death or comportment with regard to death.

Combining philosophical speculations on mourning and death, event and repetition, and time and difference with incisive commentary on Bonhomme’s photographs and a narrative of Derrida’s 1995 trip to Greece, Athens, Still Remains is one of Derrida’s most accessible, personal, and moving works without being, for all that, any less philosophical. As Derrida reminds us, the word photography—an eminently Greek word—means “the writing of light,” and it brings together today into a single frame contemporary questions about the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction and much older questions about the relationship between light, revelation, and truth—in other words, an entire philosophical tradition that first came to light in the shadow of the Acropolis.”

First published in a bilingual French–Modern Greek edition as the preface to a collection of photographs by Jean-François Bonhomme, Athēna stē skia tēs Akropolēs / Athènes à l’ombre de l’Acropole, Oikos, Athens, 1996.

Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas
Publisher Fordham University Press, New York, 2010
ISBN 0823232050, 9780823232055
73 pages

Review: Ginette Michaud (Spirale, in French).

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PDF (updated on 2024-4-22)