Cultural Flows

The Oriental Woman

General questions
How have cultural texts
(lit/art/film/philosophical writing)
been produced and consumed across
national boundaries?
How are other peoples/cultures
represented in cultural texts?
What happens when cultural others
represent themselves?

Why the Oriental woman?

The figure of Oriental woman (or the exotic/foreign
woman) is a privileged symbol in
transnational/transcultural relations.
Among other things she has been made to symbolise:
- all the mystery and allure of the foreign/exotic
- the threat/danger posed by the unknown
- resistance to colonial ad neo-colonial forms of power
The history of this myth is closely bound up with the
history of European colonialism.
But the legacy of this myth-making endures today (one
might think of anxieties surrounding practice of veiling).

Overview of next few weeks

1. Colonial perspectives:
Orientalism/Exoticism
Consider the role the Oriental woman plays
in the colonial imagination.
Does figure of OW in colonial representations
tell us much about the lives of women in
other countries ? Or does it tell us more
about the fantasies/anxieties of the West?
What is the nature of these
fantasies/anxieties?

2.) Assia Djebar

How does Djebar, as an Algerian
woman, engage with a colonial
legacy that positions her as doubly
different (a foreigner and a woman)?
What is at stake in Djebars decision
to write in French (the language of
the coloniser)?

3) Postcolonial perspectives 2: Samira

Bellil / Princess Hijab
What is at stake politically and personally
when women perceived as ethnically
other speak out against male oppression?
What are our expectations, as readers,
when we approach a text by an author
marked as culturally/ethnically other?
How might writers/artists seek to skew
expectations and reframe debates about
gender and cultural difference?

4.) Postcolonial perspectives 3: Marjane

Satrapi
How are the East and West represented in
Persepolis? In what ways does Satrapi complicate
the picture?
How are we positoned as (Western) readers of the
text?
In what ways might the protagonist be seen to
have a transnational identity?
How does Satrapi deal with traumatic subject
matter?
Why might the graphic novel form be a
particularly apt genre for transnational subject
matter?

France/Algeria
French colonisation of Algeria begins in the 1830s. Subjugation
of Algeria is extremely brutal and bloody.
Algeria remains under military rule until 1870 when a civilian
administration is established.
Algeria is not a colony but an integral part of France itself
(LAlgrie franaise)
However this does not mean all colonized subjects are equal
citizens. There is a hierarchised system of citizenship that
excludes Muslim Algerians.
One of the major official justifications for the colonial
enterprise in late 19C is the mission civilisatrice or civilising
mission: the idea that advanced Western societies have a
moral duty to bring civilization to backwards peoples.
This entails the dissipation and destruction of indigenous
cultures and ways of life.
French-Algeria ends in 1962 after bitter war of independence

What is the place of the Oriental Woman in

the French colonial imagination?

She appears as a privileged fantasy

figure. Like many myths she is doublesided.
- She represents the colonizers fantasy
of domination.
- She represents the colonizers fear of
failing to establish power and of being
conquered himself.
Some pictorial examples from the 19C

Eugne Delacroix: Women of Algiers in their

apartment (1834)

Dominique Ingres: The Turkish Bath (1862)

Eugne Delacroix: The Death of

Sardanapalus (1827)

Colonial feminists
Colonial feminists like Hubertine Auclert
represented OW as victims in need of rescue.
This serves to
a.) Justify the colonial mission
b.) Lend succour to a domestic feminist agenda
- colonies provided context for European
women to prove their usefulness to the nation
- CF represented indigenous women as key to
success of colonial enterprise and European
women were ideally placed to influence them.

The veiled woman

Not only hopes but also fears of coloniser
projected onto figure of Oriental woman.
In the colonial imagination, the veil comes
to signify a barrier that prevents the
colonizer from taking possession of the
oriental woman and by extension the
colonised land.
The veil can also appear to put the woman
in a position of power she can see
without being seen.

The Battle of Algiers (dir. by Gillo

Pontecorvo 1966)

Marc Garanger:Femmes Algriennes 1960