Colonial collecting

Between the turn of the century and World War I, postcards became mass media of communication and collectible objects for the first time in French history. ¹ A significant portion of the millions of postcards produced yearly in France displayed Algerian tourist sites and ethnic types. During the 1980s, post-colonial scholarship set out to unmask the colonial agenda in these postcards by linking seemingly non-political Orientalist iconography to the French colonial project. Malek Alloula's The Colonial Harem, the best-known of these revisionist texts, provides an important interpretation of the images, yet also demonstrates the shortcomings of an approach that focuses solely on Orientalist imagery. ² Alloula reproduces postcards of belly dancers and harem women (typical Orientalist iconography) and arranges the images into a narrative so that the models are progressively unveiled. Using metaphors of penetration and possession, he compares the unveiling of the women with the French colonial conquest of Algeria. By rearranging the cards in his book, however, Alloula fails to consider what personal arrangements of the images might have meant for those who collected them. Furthermore, he overgeneralizes the metaphor of sexual conquest and overly delimits both the audience for the cards and their meanings: penetration and possession imply that the viewers and collectors were heterosexual males. Rather than reduce the postcards to a monolithic masculine colonial imperative, as anti-Orientalist readings tend to do, we must investigate how the images functioned differently depending on the context of their use. This chapter seeks to uncover the layers of meaning the cards acquired as “views” and “types” were produced by the government-aided tourist industry and displayed by French collectionneuses.