Read: (a) Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, Chapters 1-4 (“The Orient as Stereotype and Phantasm”; “Women from the Outside”; “Women’s Prisons”; “Women’s Quarters”)
TRIGGER WARNING: Today’s materials are drawn from the colonial picture postcard archive. They include hyper-sexualized photographs of women taken under questionable conditions as well as photographs of veiled women that were almost certainly taken without their consent or under questionable conditions (in which consent was likely not possible). They also include nudity and racist/racialized and ethnic stereotypes.
View: Core archive plus work by contemporary artist Zineb Sedira
CORE ARCHIVE: Selected photographs from Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem
Zineb Sedira (artist’s website)
When looking at Sedira’s work on her website, please look in particular her work from the late 1990s and early 2000s, which deals more explicitly with the question of feminine representation and the representation of her mother, grandmother, and other women in her family, notably: Retelling Histories (2003); Jinns (2003); Mother, Daughter, and I (2003); Mother Tongue (2002); and La maison de ma mère (2002).
Research: Algerian War for Independence