Summary Of Malek Alloula's The Colonial Harem

In The Colonial Harem, Algerian author Malek Alloula analyzes the French colonial gaze on his native country and particularly its women through the historical record of postcards made from 1900 to 1930. Alloula argues that the postcards were a form of symbolic assault on the veiled and private women of Algeria, who were played in them by paid models, as denizens of the colonial fantasy of the harem, as created by Orientalism.
In the first chapter “The Orient as Stereotype and Phantasm,” Alloula outlines his mission to respond to the colonial gaze as an Algerian by analyzing the mechanisms used to create the desired phantasm or phantasy of the exotic, and often sexual, commoditized and presented as indisputable reality in the form of photo postcards. …show more content…
Chapter 5 is called “Couples” and deals with how the arrangement of Algerian models into nuclear family groups was a violence against the individual models who were being forced to transgress the moral code of their culture and an ultimate symbol of the triumph of colonialism over the tribal and extended family system by replacing it with a relationship system made in their own image. In Chapter 6, "The Figures of the Harem: Dress and Jewelry,” Alloula acknowledges that being underlaid with the phantasm of the harem does not mean that the postcards are devoid of any reality and that they must, in fact, contain at least some “minimum of truthfulness,” (Alloula 52). But even in this collection in which the best example of true ethnography is found, the subject’s detailed and unique adornments play into the phantasm of the harem by intimating the infinite, intricate and individual fantasies to be explored in that world of exotic