ABSTRACT
In his perceptive study The Colonial Harem, Malek Alloula dissects the sexual fantasies of French colonists as embodied in postcards of veiled and unveiled Algerian women, presenting his own critique as a form of exorcism of the evil eye or gaze of the oppressors. He states that the reading he undertakes is necessary, for “in the absence of a confrontation of opposed gazes, I attempt here, lagging far behind History, to return this immense postcard to its sender” (Alloula, 1986: 5). Alloula’s response encapsulates what are by now the classic tropes of colonial and post-colonial discourse: the territorial, economic and symbolic rape of a civilization; fixity in a deformed Otherness; the pained and self-conscious process of reclaiming one’s own history and traditions. What I wish to highlight in the present context, however, is Alloula’s strategy of reading and mapping, whereby erotic imagery becomes meaningful (for the violated group) as the bearer of an entire historical and ideological complex. In other words, offensive as the pictures are to Alloula as a form of sexual traffic, it is what they signify (the traumatic colonial encounter between France and Algeria) that he needs to address. 1
