page_title: Malek Alloula
section_title: Bibliography
hierarchical_section_title: Malek Alloula / Bibliography
caption_attribution_description: English: Orientalist depictions of Arab females wearing a hijab while exposing their breasts.
context_page_description: Malek Alloula was an Algierian poet, writer, editor, and literary critic.
  He is chiefly notable for his poetry and essays on philosophy. He wrote several books, notably a French publication entitled Le Harem Colonial, translated into English as The Colonial Harem, which was generally well received. The author analyses colonial photographic postcards of Algerian women from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, arguing that the postcards do not accurately represent Algerian women, but rather a Frenchman's fantasy of the "Oriental" female.
context_section_description: Having become an editor in Paris in 1967, he continued writing poetry, essays on poetics, and philosophy, working in the French language. As a critic, he spoke against the appropriation of poetry in the service of the Algerian revolution, following the independence of Algeria from France in 1962.
  Most of his essays and prose, infused with poetic touches, speak about Algerian culture, Algerian-Beber culture, food, and his childhood memories of his father, teachers, and friends. Among his various publications, the most influential is Le Harem Colonial (The Colonial Harem), which analyzes a collection of postcards displaying "exotic" images of Algerian women, photographed by French colonists and sent back to France. According to Alloula, this was done as a sign of conquest; he asserts that the postcards visually represent power relations between colonized and colonizer. The book provides commentary on the images, especially those depicting eroticized "scenes of Algerian women" during the French colonial regime. Between 1900 and 1930, French entrepreneurs produced postcards of Algerian women and circulated them in France. According to Alloula, this constitutes a French colonial projection of a world that never existed. He declares that, "Wanting to possess the Algerian land, French colonists first claimed the bodies of its women, using sex as a surrogate for an extension of another larger usurpation of culture." Alloula's book claims that these photographs were circulated as evidence of the exotic, backward, and strange customs of Algerians. According to Alloula, the Algerian women used in the images are not actually harem women, but rather orphans and prostitutes who were asked to pose for the photographer. Alloula denounces the voyeuristic perspective of the French on Algerian women; he claims the images are not representative of the real Algerian women, but rather of Western fantasies of the Oriental female and her inaccessibility in the forbidden harem.
caption: Photographf of an "Arab Woman with the yachmak" published in The Colonial Harem
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