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Recycling the ‘Colonial Harem’? Women in Postcards from French Indochina

University of Newcastle, Jennifer.Yee{at}ncl.ac.uk

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 Indochinese 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.

Key Words: Colonialism • Harem • Indochina • Orientalism • Photography • Postcards • Women

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