Frenchhttp://frc.sagepub.com/ Cultural Studies Recycling the 'Colonial Harem'? Women in Postcards from French Indochina Jennifer Yee French Cultural Studies 2004 15: 5 DOI: 10.1177/0957155804040405 The online version of this article can be found at: http://frc.sagepub.com/content/15/1/5 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for French Cultural Studies can be found at: Email Alerts: http://frc.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://frc.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://frc.sagepub.com/content/15/1/5.refs.html >> Version of Record - Feb 1, 2004 What is This? Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on February 5, 2013 15 (1) Jennifer Yee 13/1/04 10:56 am Page 1 French Cultural Studies Recycling the ‘Colonial Harem’? Women in Postcards from French Indochina JENNIFER YEE University of Newcastle While there has been relatively little serious analysis of colonial postcards, Malek Alloula’s influential book Le Harem colonial put forward a reading of such postcards from the early 1900s as perpetuating a harem fantasy through which French male colonists viewed North Africa. This article analyses a selection of postcards of women from France’s Indochinese colonies at the same period, and suggests that Alloula’s thesis does not fit them in a comparable way. The Indochinese postcards borrow frames of reference from pre-existing pictorial styles, taken sometimes from the harem but also from chinoiserie and contemporary European photographic portraiture; rather than portraying a single vision of the ‘Other’ they oscillate between showing the Indo- chinese woman as ‘same’ and ‘different’. And these images appear to have been addressed primarily to a female collector, suggesting an intended reading rather removed from Alloula’s vision of colonial postcards as pornography. Keywords: Colonialism; Harem; Indochina; Orientalism; Photography; Postcards; Women T he growth of European imperialism in the last decades of the nineteenth century, corresponding with the spread of steam travel, was in many ways a precursor of the globalization of our own era. The domination of the globe by the imperial powers was built on new networks that shipped men and information around the world with unprecedented rapidity. And the great steamships also carried a relatively new breed of traveller, the tourist, around whom a whole host of new industries arose. Among them was that French Cultural Studies, 15(1): 005–019 Copyright © SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com [200402] 10.1177/0957155804040405 Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on February 5, 2013 15 (1) Jennifer Yee 13/1/04 10:56 am Page 2 6 FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 15(1) prime symptom of capitalist tourism, the picture postcard. Invented in Austria in the 1860s, the postcard was authorized in France from 1872 and became very popular after the Exposition Universelle of 1889 with cards of the Eiffel Tower; French production rose steadily thereafter, reaching 8 million in 1899, 60 million in 1902 and 123 million in 1910 (Prochaska, 1989–90: 30; Kyrou, 1966: 7–11). The years 1900–1925 are sometimes known as the ‘golden age’ of the postcard thanks to cheap new techniques of reproduction that made the picture postcard a perfect symbol of what Walter Benjamin calls ‘the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ (Benjamin: 1936). In the early 1900s the sheer ‘repeatability’ of the postcard made it a choice object for collection by the new middle classes. Facilitating such collections, the world of the early picture postcards was extremely ordered, each card having its place as one of a numbered series produced by a particular photographic studio. Such cards also set out, in their own humble way, to organize and classify the world, and French postcards were generally divided into the categories of ‘Scènes’ (urban or rural) and ‘Types’. Recent work, notably that of Panivong Norindr (1996) and Nicola Cooper (2001), has reflected a new engagement with the study of visual cultural artefacts from French Indochina, in particular looking at the Indochinese sections of the colonial exhibitions and films on the theme of French Indochina.1 There has also been considerable debate and analysis of post- cards from France’s North African colonies; but although photographic studios were established in all the main colonial centres, Indochinese postcards have attracted much less critical attention.2 Yet the golden age of the postcard, 1900–1925, corresponded with the height of the French colonial presence in Indochina. Can such postcards tell us a different story from the postcards produced in North Africa, or do they reproduce the same discourse? To offer a partial answer to this question, I will look in particular at the portrayal of ‘types’ of women in selected postcards from colonial Indochina in the early 1900s. I will suggest that as the area had fallen under French domination relatively recently, the photographic studios were confronted with the problem of how to ‘see’ Indochina, and that they had recourse to pre-established framing devices borrowed from elsewhere. But first, I will look at one particular critical approach to early colonial postcards of women, so that we can ask whether this North African model can be applied to our Indochinese corpus. Malek Alloula and the Harem colonial In 1981 Malek Alloula published a collection of early colonial postcards produced in North Africa under the title Le Harem colonial: images d’un sous-érotisme, a volume that has recently been re-edited. Accompanying reproductions of semi-clothed ‘mauresques’ dancing, reclining, gazing from behind barred windows, or smoking a narguileh, Alloula’s text offers a Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on February 5, 2013 15 (1) Jennifer Yee 13/1/04 10:56 am Page 3 JENNIFER YEE: RECYCLING THE ‘COLONIAL HAREM’? 7 critical reading of the colonial postcard from North Africa as ‘la mise en œuvre par le moyen photographique du fantasme du harem, sa reprise dégradée et dégradante’ (Alloula, 1981: 9). He sees the postcard as ‘le degré zéro de la photographie’, in which ‘le sens préexiste à l’icône, à la représentation’: the postcard does not reflect reality, it is an empty photo filled by discourse, ‘c’est du discours photographié’ (Alloula, 1981: 23). This constitutes a double criticism of the colonial postcard, seeing it as degrading sexual fantasy on the one hand and as non-representative of any external reality on the other. Alloula’s polemical commentary on the postcards reproduced in his book has inspired very different reactions. Barbara Harlow, in her introduction to the English translation in 1986 follows Alloula in underlining that his commentary on these images is a way of returning the postcard to its sender and thus giving, at last, the Arab point of view and exorcizing the destructive power of the evil gaze. Clearly, one might add, Alloula’s work does not offer any parallel exorcizing of the male gaze that makes passive sexual objects of half-naked women. Nor does everyone share Harlow’s admiration: two French anthropologists working on images and representation, Gilles Boëtsch and Jean-Noël Ferrié, more recently published their own critique of Alloula’s thesis. Their criticism sets forward the following ideas: (1) a photograph, though it reflects a mise en scène, can never be entirely reduced to its ideological content and (2) a cultural product cannot be accused of exercising ideological domination over a colonized people if it does not have a direct effect on them, that is, if they are not the intended readers of such a product. The postcard, they claim, simply places foreign bodies within ‘un cadre maîtrisé par les normes occidentales de la pertinence esthétique’, creating ‘des hybrides agréables à voir’ (Boëtsch and Ferrié, 1995: 299, 302, 303). Still more critical of Alloula, though from a feminist perspective rather than a reactionary ‘occidentalist’ perspective, is the response of Marieke Bal. Interrogating the problematic nature of the post- colonial (male) gaze and its repetition of the objectivization of the colonial (female) subject, she suggests that Alloula’s conflation of aesthetic and erotic judgements or ‘aestherotics’ in fact reiterates the same categories and positions as his ‘opponents – the colonial photographer and his clients’ (Bal, 1991: 37). Looking at a small selection of postcards from Indochina, this article questions Alloula’s conception of popular colonial imagery as a pornographic fantasy of harem life. Certainly, Boëtsch and Ferrié’s contention that there is no cultural imperialism exercised by postcards since they were not intended to be seen by the colonized populations should not distract us from the essential fact that colonialism exists in the minds of the colonizing population as well as in the minds of the colonized. I will however follow Boëtsch and Ferrié in suggesting that the photographer seeks a frame of representation drawn from western aesthetic norms. I will read the examples selected along two different lines that can usefully be described in terms of Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on February 5, 2013 15 (1) Jennifer Yee 13/1/04 10:56 am Page 4 8 FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 15(1) Jakobson’s syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes, the axis of combination that will help us to read the postcard as suggestive of a narrative, and the axis of selection that is of course linked to the ‘recycling’ of pictorial codes suggested by my title. This double analysis will, I hope, shed light on the mechanisms of cultural borrowing through which Indochina was portrayed as belonging to the more general discourses of orientalism. And finally, in response to Bal’s critique I will attempt briefly to evoke the presence of a new character in this exchange: the turn-of-the-century French female collector. * * * French cultural contact with Indochina, though dating back to missionaries in the seventeenth century, had not made the French public familiar with a specific pictorial tradition, thus failing to provide a visual frame of reference through which the colonizers could ‘see’ Indochina. The novelist and journalist Paul Bonnetain lamented, in 1884: . . . tout écrivain sait faire vivre l’Afrique, l’Inde ou l’Amérique du Sud sous les yeux de son public. [. . .] En Indo-Chine, la tâche du voyageur est autrement âpre, autrement difficile. Artiste, il se désespère devant des laideurs ternes et étiolantes; conteur, il se bat les flancs devant des excentricités nécessitant, pour être dépeintes, le style d’un manuel Roret, avec notes au bas des pages et figures dans le texte! . . . (Bonnetain, 1884: 220) The lack of pre-established frames of reference thus created a difficulty of seeing Indochina. One of the ways around this dilemma was to adopt other pictorial codes, inherited from older traditions of exoticism, and the first postcard I will look at is an example of this ‘recycling’. The harem theme transferred to Indochina Figure 1 shows a trio of women on a bench in the photographer’s studio. The image can first be read syntagmatically, as a double discourse of eroticism and ethnography. Its display of feminine flesh through a clumsy composition of awkwardly raised leg and still more awkwardly denuded breasts, along with the multiplicity of bodies on display, suggests availability. The caption, on the other hand, uses ethnographic discourse to offer a reading of the image as a depiction of local customs, and its didactic motive is highlighted by the use of the term Kédillot. As Alloula puts it, in his discussion of North African images, the project of such a postcard is thus to maintain, ‘dans un brouillage constant (la ruse), une triple instance: celle de l’aveu (l’ethnographie), celle du non-dit (l’idéologie coloniale), celle du refoulé (le fantasme)’ (Alloula, 1981: 23). On the other hand, a paradigmatic reading of this image reveals that it Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on February 5, 2013 15 (1) Jennifer Yee 13/1/04 10:56 am Page 5 JENNIFER YEE: RECYCLING THE ‘COLONIAL HAREM’? 9 Figure 1. ‘90 B. TONKIN – Femme fumant le Kédillot (pipe commune)’. Cliché Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. belongs to various series. The first of these is of course evoked explicitly by the caption: the image is number ‘90 B’, belonging to a specific series which is itself the product of a particular photographic studio. In other words the postcard belongs to a paradigm within which it is itself merely a fragment of a whole, to be pieced together by the individual collector.3 The ‘légende’ also claims to refer to a single ethnographic truth situating an essentialist ‘race’ or people. In fact the sheer sameness of the Other is central to the double discourse of these postcards, which reassuringly posit the Other as belonging to a recognizable ‘type’ that can be labelled, classified and collected. Nor is this reassuring sameness so very removed from the pornographic. The classi- fication of the world implicit in the ethnographic discourse underlying the colonial postcard is far from incompatible with the suggested collection of the world, and such a collection can itself easily have, as Alloula suggests, a sub- text of sexual appropriation. In 1903 the libertine travel writer Jean d’Estray published a book called Petits quarts d’heure amoureux d’Extrême-Orient that recounted his experiences among the prostitutes and girl-children of Asia. After many such encounters, he tells how he summons a female musician who has attracted his increasingly blasé eye, but is disappointed when she is delivered to his doorstep and he finds her the same as all the others: ‘c’est un exemplaire de la femme annamite, édition varietur tirée à deux ou trois cent mille exemplaires’ (D’Estray, 1903: 240–1). In D’Estray’s narrative Asian women are all fundamentally the same, all available to be bought or taken and all practically indistinguishable. The metaphor he uses Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on February 5, 2013 15 (1) Jennifer Yee 13/1/04 10:56 am Page 6 10 FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 15(1) Figure 2. ‘310 A Jeune Mauresque et Femme Kabyle. ND Phot’. Postmarked Oran, 1906. Author’s collection. is in itself a telling one: the era of mechanical reproduction has perhaps devalorized the book; the era of global travel has certainly devalorized the encounter with the ‘Other’. But this postcard, I would suggest, also draws directly on codes of reference taken in fact from the North African cards that form Alloula’s corpus. The failed attempt to evoke languorous lesbian sexuality and fantasized feminine availability can thus best be understood by a comparison with a typical North African image such as the second postcard, ‘Jeune Mauresque et Femme Kabyle’. This image uses particular codes of portrayal that are recognizably the same as those described by Alloula, and which have been put into use for the Indochinese image too. The clearly signalled availability, and above all the use of sensuous female plurality was part of the harem theme, and followed what Alloula calls ‘un principe de duplication’ according to which the photographer will always prefer to show several women rather than one, suggesting ‘le saphisme oriental’ and constructing the harem as a universe of feminine frustration and availability to the absent male viewer (Alloula, 1981: 12, 64). Many of these images showed women, reclining as here, smoking the narguileh, one of the essential props of orientalist imagery which is replaced by the kédillot in the Indochinese postcard. Although it was very unusual for Western men to be allowed into real harems, this seemed only to increase the desirability of images staging such imagined scenes. These popular portrayals of ‘harem’ images repeat a particular ‘colonial phantasm’ (Norindr, 1996: 17) that is in fact inherited from an older orientalist tradition in which the Turkish Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on February 5, 2013 15 (1) Jennifer Yee 13/1/04 10:56 am Page 7 JENNIFER YEE: RECYCLING THE ‘COLONIAL HAREM’? 11 Figure 3. ‘68– Une Bayadère Annamite. Planté, Éditeur, Saïgon’. Handwritten notation ‘Saïgon 11 juin 1906’. Author’s collection. seraglio played the role of Ur-model for this trope of exotic feminine plurality and availability. The peculiar clumsiness of the Tonkinese scene can best be understood as the result of an attempt to transfer this orientalist fantasy to a new and even less appropriate context: its very failure as an image is revelatory of an attempt at recycling imagery. An even more striking – though rather more charming – example of this transfer of orientalist pictorial codes can be found in figure 3, showing a postcard with the caption ‘Une Bayadère Annamite’ which, like the North African card, dates from 1906. It shows a young girl in a long robe and – curiously enough – stockings, as well as jewellery and slippers, reclining on a sofa and playing with a fan. These elements set up a syntax that can be read relatively simply in terms of playful feminine availability in a luxurious interior. The posture and the sofa belong to the harem paradigm, in which the main purpose of the raised arms was to display half-naked breasts. Intriguingly, the caption in this case does not evoke the ethnological pretext that recurs in the majority of colonial postcards of ‘types’: it reads instead, ‘68 – Une Bayadère Annamite’. Now the term bayadère originally referred to one of the sacred dancers of India but, popularized by Romantic exoticism, it had become commonplace enough to appear in Flaubert’s dictionary of ‘idées reçues’: ‘Bayadère. – Mot qui entraîne l’imagination. Toutes les femmes de l’Orient sont des bayadères (v. odalisques).’ The sacred dancer Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on February 5, 2013 15 (1) Jennifer Yee 13/1/04 10:56 am Page 8 12 FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 15(1) thus merges with the reclining odalisque of orientalism.4 Like our first image, this postcard thus reflects a borrowing or recycling of older orientalist paradigms. And yet there is also another visual code at work here, which can help to explain the black stockings, the long sleeves, the comfortable bourgeois sofa, and even the playful, teasing air: these belong to the European society lady. This image thus fits into several – apparently contradictory – paradigms: the Indian bayadère, the erotic mauresque, and the languid but playful European grande dame. Other transferred codes – Chinese art Our next Indochinese example, on the other hand, takes us away from the Orientalist paradigm of the harem. Figure 4. ‘5 – Jeune Fille Annamite. Cliché M. The syntax of the image suggests a Perray. Reproduction interdite.’ narrative: the photo represents a girl Author’s collection. walking beside a misty lake who protects herself from the rain with her bamboo umbrella and pauses to rest on some rocks. And the caption below the image reads ‘5 – Jeune Fille Annamite’, the number reiterating the fact that the object belongs to a whole series of ‘jeunes filles annamites’ that it would be possible to sample.5 Yet the staging of the image draws on a very different frame of reference, far from both the paradigms of ethnography and the harem. The background of this photograph is a painted backdrop of a water scene, with rocks piled in front of it on the flat floor of the photographic studio. This setting evokes the world of Chinese painting and the umbrella echoes Chinese parasols from countless portrayals of court ladies. Unlike the first two examples, this image thus draws upon Chinese art as its dominant pictorial model. Yet it is striking that neither of the pictorial codes used in this hybrid image – Chinese or Western painting – would normally permit a posture such as the girl has taken here, sitting with her knees wide apart: in Chinese codes, such a posture would only have been taken by a prostitute. Coupled with the stern, slightly hostile gaze of the young girl, this confident posture and the firmly planted feet, distinctly free of any Chinese-style binding, give the image a certain presence that goes well beyond the intended westernized ‘chinoiserie’. Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on February 5, 2013 15 (1) Jennifer Yee 13/1/04 10:56 am Page 9 JENNIFER YEE: RECYCLING THE ‘COLONIAL HAREM’? 13 Figure 5. ‘1402. COCHINCHINE – Saïgon – Figure 6. ‘300. COCHINCHINE – Femme de Femme de Saïgon’. Postmarked Long-Thanh Saïgon. Collection P. Dieulefils Photographe, 1906. Author’s collection. 53, rue Jules Ferry à Hanoï’. Postmarked Saïgon 1905. Author’s collection. Codes transferred from Europe: the portrait Yet another, very different, set of pictorial codes can be seen at work in a whole series of postcards, of which the following examples are a small selection.6 Far from presenting women in terms of sexual availability, these postcards set up the codes of social respectability by echoing the European photographic portrait. Figure 5 is apparently a portrait of a young girl standing beside a table in the photographer’s studio. The painted backdrop shows tropical plants and flowers, and the props suggest a wealthy bourgeois interior: she is standing on a patterned carpet; her right hand is placed on a carved Chinese box on a table covered with an opulently patterned cloth; an elegant Chinese vase, and a parasol in her left hand, complete the picture. The pose is in many ways oddly familiar to us: the formal portraits of nineteenth-century photography often adopted this frontal, full-length pose, with a similarly serious gaze. A syntagmatic reading thus suggests ownership, bourgeois Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on February 5, 2013 15 (1) Jennifer Yee 13/1/04 10:56 am Page 10 14 FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 15(1) comfort and cultivation. And the paradigm, to a large extent, is that of contemporary European portrait photography. Yet the caption suggests that this is not an individual portrait, but simply a ‘Femme de Saïgon’, and number 1402 in a collection. Moreover, the image is part of a series, and beyond it is an entire paradigm of such portraits. It can thus be compared directly to postcard 6: here, the young girl is seated, again in a posture recognizable from European portrait photography and which was far from typical in a country where chairs were not commonly used. Yet though the pose is different, it is the same girl. The painted backdrop, the table and heavy tablecloth, the carved box, even the parasol now leaning negligently against the table, are the same. The girl’s dress is different, but her jewellery is the same. The foot of the same white vase is just visible on the left. Clearly the same model and props have been used to provide a slightly different image, one indeed of a series of almost indistinguishable ‘femmes de Saïgon’. In fact this is not a portrait of an individual, but an image that stages, or performs, Indochinese bourgeois respectability. These ‘portrait’ postcards create a tamed version of exoticism, establishing what could in some ways be called an anti-exotic aesthetics. These images, read syntag- matically, tell of young women of means, in comfortable cultivated interiors. They can be read within the paradigm of other such photographic images: that is, the portraits of the French middle-class postcard-collecting young lady. This myth asserts the sameness and equivalence of the bourgeois feminine experience as it is lived in France and in France’s distant colonies. And yet at the same time the captions affirm that the subject here is not in fact individual but general: they are representations of ethnographic ‘types’, and also objects to be collected. Such images have a direct equivalent in a literary figure that could be called, from the title of a novel by Myriam Harry first published in 1901, the ‘petite épouse’. The ‘petite épouse’ or ‘congaï’ was the native mistress taken by a colonizer to run his household and furnish his bed. Myriam Harry, like many male novelists, tells stories inspired by the figure of the ‘congaï’ that repeat the same basic theme, in various different ways: the native, morganatic wife, has a practical and a sexual function to fulfil, but the colonizer’s relationship with her is always false, an unsatisfying and inadequate replacement for a ‘true’ marriage with a Frenchwoman. Thus in a novel called Mademoiselle Moustique, mœurs tonkinoises, Eugène Jung (1895: 229, 231). writes of the congaï as a ‘Joujou toujours gai, petit animal qu’on aimait à couvrir de bracelets, de colliers d’or, de crépon et de soie brochée’, but mocks the idea that she could be a rival for a fiancée left behind in France: ‘Comme si le petit meuble amusant que j’avais dans la maison pouvait remplacer l’absente!’ In another novel, Jean d’Estray (1905: 204) describes the heroine as having the allure of ‘une petite congaï, voulant jouer à la vraie femme, comme nos fillettes cherchent à ressembler à leurs grandes sœurs’. The reader can both recognize signs of a ‘common’ femininity and be Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on February 5, 2013 15 (1) Jennifer Yee 13/1/04 10:56 am Page 11 JENNIFER YEE: RECYCLING THE ‘COLONIAL HAREM’? 15 comforted by the confirmation that she – for the intended reader often seems to have been a woman – is incomparably above such a creature who can only hope to echo ‘real’ womanhood in much the same way that a toy, a small animal, a piece of furniture or a little girl dressing up can. This colonial mimicry is in fact reassuring to the reader/viewer; as Homi Bhabha (1994: 86, 92, his emphasis) puts it, ‘colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite.’ This ambivalence of the colonial gaze produces a slippage in which the Other is ‘not quite’ and ‘not white’. The colonial postcards using the ‘portrait’ motif are excellent illustrations of this colonial ambivalence. ‘Not quite/ not white’, these images perform Figure 7. ‘71 – Une congaï Annamite. Planté, middle-class respectability in a luxurious éditeur, Saïgon’. Postmarked Long-Thanh interior but simultaneously reaffirm 1908. Author’s collection. exotic difference, coded in terms of objects – the carved box, the vase – belonging to the already familiar and reassuring exoticism of ‘chinoiserie’. This in turn raises the question of the identity of the viewer: for whom was this myth of middle-class respectability intended? A partial answer can be provided by simply turning over the cards. Let us look briefly at a third example of a ‘respectable portrait’, in which it is now no surprise to see a painted backdrop of a luxurious European interior, a European chair, and a young model in rich clothing and jewellery with a pose of confident ownership. Although the style is somewhat different, the myth being portrayed is very much the same as that of examples 5 and 6. If we now turn the card over, we learn that it was sent to a Mademoiselle Lucienne Verdan, in Haute Savoie. In fact my collection includes two such cards, almost identical (‘71 – Une congaï Annamite’ and ‘66 – Une riche Annamite’) that were sent to the same woman. In other words, this image was chosen to appeal to a woman. What of the other cards we have seen? one of the other portraits (‘300. Cochinchine – femme de Saïgon’) is addressed to ‘Mademoiselle Hauyyell, employée des postes’ in Gaillac. And the Bayadère card is addressed to ‘Madame V. Ferrou’, Agen. In fact all the Indochinese postcards in my Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on February 5, 2013 15 (1) Jennifer Yee 13/1/04 10:56 am Page 12 16 FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 15(1) Figure 8. Same, other side. ‘Mademoiselle Lucienne Verdan Rue du Pont, Bonneville (Haute Savoie)’ (admittedly small) collection of images of women either have no addressee or a female addressee. Perhaps, then, these ‘respectable’ portraits of young women have a function very far removed from Alloula’s pornographic ‘album’. It is tempting to develop a hypothetical distinction between discourse in postcards from different colonies, which would suggest that the harem theme encouraged a ‘pornographic’ masculine correspondence from North Africa while the more respectable Indochinese phantasmatic encouraged correspondence with women. Such a hypothesis would of course need to be pursued in further research, taking it beyond the bounds of the present essay. It is worth noting, however, that while postcard 2, the ‘harem’ image from North Africa showing bare breasts, is addressed to a ‘Monsieur Jules Roch’, the message itself reads ‘Mes sincères amitiés, Marie’, casting some doubt on the entirely masculine and pornographic nature of this correspondence. In any case, the ‘portrait’ postcards from Indochina serve a very different purpose: they hold up a distant, deforming mirror to the French collectionneuse. There is a subtle dialectic here between identi- fication with the sitter and reaffirmation of difference, that encapsulates one of the most problematic aspects of the relation with the Other. Framing the Other: Sexual Object or Refracting Mirror? Colonial postcards, entering the albums and the minds of their recipients, had an important role to play: not only did such cards offer a popularized, Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on February 5, 2013 15 (1) Jennifer Yee 13/1/04 10:56 am Page 13 JENNIFER YEE: RECYCLING THE ‘COLONIAL HAREM’? 17 pseudo-ethnographic inventory, or classification of the world, but at the same time they adopted recognized pictorial codes in an attempt to interest and charm the French public – a public that was not always spontaneously in favour of colonial conquest (Mandery, 1995: 292). But was the colonial postcard primarily an erotic object, subjecting the Other to the violence of the pornographic gaze, as Alloula’s analysis suggests? Rebecca J. DeRoo (1998: 145, 152) has already pointed out one of the problems with Alloula’s approach, namely that he ‘over-generalizes the metaphor of sexual conquest and overly delimits both the audience of the cards and their meanings: penetration and possession imply that the viewers and collectors were heterosexual males’. She goes on to underline that a tradition of female collectors of postcards was well established by the early 1900s. Naomi Schor (1992: 211) has also pointed out the association of postcards with the feminine. Certainly, the small selection we have seen suggests that what Alloula terms the ‘refoulé’, the repressed sexual fantasy, is an adequate reading only for some such cards. Indochina is packaged and presented, certainly, but not only for the male gaze; perhaps just as often these images narrate a phantasmatic Indochina for the women left at home. To do this, the photographic studios draw on a variety of visual paradigms, adopting pre- existing frames of reference through which to tell their stories. The use of familiar pictorial codes allowed the presentation of difference as both infinitely repeatable, essential and at the same time containable. This portrayal of Indochinese women via familiar codes, containing their difference within the known and recognizable, allowed the female viewer, in DeRoo’s words (1998: 154), ‘to mobilize a tactical identification’. What is in some ways most striking about these images is the fact that they are so obviously the product of belle époque France. As Christian Maurel (1980: 20) puts it in his study of colonial exotic photography, some of the women ‘ont l’air de poser dans l’atelier d’un peintre bourgeois un peu décadent’. The bayadère postcard is a case in point, telling its story of a voluptuous bourgeois interior in a way that appears almost tongue-in-cheek. Is the photographer offering an ironic commentary on Flaubert’s idée reçue of the oriental bayadère? And does the mischievous girl share some of the pleasure of masquerading as a society lady who is posing as an Oriental Odalisque and calling herself an Indian dancer? It is certainly hard, gazing at a photograph such as this one, to adhere to Boëtsch and Ferrié’s affirmation that the real – that is an unreconstructed, pre-semiotic truth – subsists in all photographs. Rather, it appears that the material ‘fact’ of these Indochinese women is reconstructed through a series of borrowed frames of reference that recycle various more familiar colonial phantasms. In this era of mechanical reproduction and global traffic, not only are objects – books, photographs – mass-produced, but codes of reference themselves are also traded, reproduced and exchanged with increasing rapidity from one geographical sphere to another. Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on February 5, 2013 15 (1) Jennifer Yee 13/1/04 10:56 am Page 14 18 FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 15(1) Notes An earlier version of this article was presented as a paper at the Twentieth-Century French Studies Colloquium, University of Illinois, 28 March 2003. My thanks go to Jane Bradley Winston, who organized the panel that day, and to Kathryn Robson, Alison Hardie and Mary Jean Green for their helpful comments. 1. The term ‘Indochina’ will be used without scare quotes throughout, but it is itself far from being unproblematic; see, for example, Norindr (1996): 17–20. 2. The main exception is an earlier publication, of great interest to collectors but with little theoretical content: Noury, J., L’Indochine avant l’ouragan, 1900–1920 (Chartres: Imprimerie Charron, 1984; re-edited 1992). 3. On the postcard as an object of collection, with its surrounding apparatus of collectors’ magazines, journals, albums, societies, see for example Prochaska (1989–90), 29–30. 4. ‘Dictionnaire des idées reçues’ in G. Flaubert, Bouvard et Pécuchet (Paris: Garnier- Flammarion, 1966), p. 337. The spelling bayadère entered French in 1782 following the earlier form balliadère, 1770, from the Portuguese bailadeira, from bailar, to dance (Petit Robert). In the relatively new world of French Indochinese fantasy, the bayadère of the 1900s may also evoke the Apsaras, the winged dancers of the Khmer temples at Angkor, and perhaps also the court dancers of the Cambodian King Sisowath who in fact visited France that same year (1906) and were famously sketched by Rodin. 5. The ethnographic pretext of the caption can be compared to the famous African collection of Fortier with its captions: ‘1384 Afrique Occidentale. Étude no. 63 Fille Soussou’ or ‘1078 Afrique Occidentale. Jeunes femmes Diolas.’ (Bibliothèque Nationale, Estampes). For details on Fortier see David, P., ‘Fortier, le maître de la carte postale ouest-africaine’ in Notes africaines, 166 (avril 1980), 29-37. 6. There are numerous similar examples in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Estampes. References Alloula, M. (1981) Le Harem colonial: images d’un sous-érotisme. Anglet: Atlantica-Séguier, 2001. Bal, M. (1991) ‘The Politics of Citation’, Diacritics 21(1): 25–45. Benjamin, W. (1936) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in W. Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn, ed. H. Arendt (1968), pp. 217–51. New York: Schocken. Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture. London/New York: Routledge. Boëtsch, G. and Ferrié, J.-N. (1995) ‘Contre Alloula: le “harem colonial” revisité’, in G. Beaugé and J.-F. Clément (eds), L’Image dans le monde arabe, pp. 299–304. Paris: CNRS. Bonnetain, P. (1884) Au Tonkin. Paris: V. Havard, 1885. Cooper, N. (2001) France in Indochina: Colonial Encounters. Oxford: Berg. DeRoo, R. J. (1998) ‘Colonial collecting: Women and Algerian cartes postales’, Parallax, 4(2): 145–57. D’Estray, J. (1903) Petits quarts d’heure amoureux d’Extrême-Orient. Paris: Éditions de la Revue libre. D’Estray, J. (1905) Thi-Sen, la petite amie exotique. Paris: Maurice Bauche, 1911. Harlow, B. (1986) Introduction to M. Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. M. Godzich and W. Godzich, pp. ix–xxii. Minneapolis/London: University of Minneapolis Press. Harry, M. (1901) Petites Épouses. Paris: Flammarion. Jung, E. (1895) Mademoiselle Moustique, mœurs tonkinoises. Paris: Flammarion. Kyrou, A. (1966) L’Âge d’or de la carte postale. Paris: André Balland. Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on February 5, 2013 15 (1) Jennifer Yee 13/1/04 10:56 am Page 15 JENNIFER YEE: RECYCLING THE ‘COLONIAL HAREM’? 19 Mandery, G. (1995) ‘Photographies et cartes postales à Tunis 1881–1914’, in G. Beaugé and J.-F. Clément (eds), L’Image dans le monde arabe, pp. 291–8. Paris: CNRS. Maurel, C. (1980) L’Exotisme colonial. Paris: Robert Laffont. Norindr, P. (1996) Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film, and Literature. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Prochaska, D (1989–90) ‘L’Algérie imaginaire: jalons pour une histoire de l’iconographie coloniale’, Gradhiva 7: 29–38. Schor, N. (1992) ‘Cartes postales: Representing Paris 1900’, Critical Inquiry 18(2): 188–241. Jennifer Yee is a lecturer at the University of Newcastle. Address for correspondence: School of Modern Languages, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU. e-mail Jennifer.Yee@ncl.ac.uk Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on February 5, 2013