 |
Thèse
VOGL, Mary B Picturing the Maghreb. Orientalism, Photography & Representation in contemporary francophone texts: Le Clezio, Ben Jelloun, Tournier
This dissertation offers a critique of photographic and verbal representations in a number of texts, particularly those by four contemporary French-language writers: Michel Tournier, J.M.G. Le Cezio, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Leila Sebbar. Despite their acute awareness of the twentieth-century crisis of representation and a prevalent suspicion of the image, these writers practice ecriture engagee or activist writing which, in conjunction with the 'concerned photography' of some photographers, works to reframe a picture of the Maghreb produced by two centuries of Orientalist misrepresentation. I evaluate to what extent cross-cultural discourses and images have displaced Orientalist paradigms in their texts. In the first and second chapters I posit that Tournier's La Goutte d'or and Le Clezio's Desert can be categorized as novels of 'postcolonial Orientalism' because although critical of stereotypical colonialist images, they are constructed upon a polar opposition between the Orient and the Occident. In the third and fourth chapters, I show how Ben Jelloun and Sebbar call into question the validity of this opposition while addressing the problems of North African immigrants in France and placing a particular emphasis on the role of images in the construction and re-vision of identity. While Tournier and Le Clezio propose writing as an antidote to the 'evil demon of images' (Baudrillard), Ben Jelloun and Sebbar advocate the use of both writing and photography as powerful tools for increasing cultural awareness. In addition to exploring the notion of photography as a metaphor for other sorts of representation, I also discuss the cultural impact of actual photographs from colonial times to the present as it relates to the texts studied. These photographs include 19$/sp[/rm th]$-century portraits of veiled women, turn-of-the-century postcard cliches of Algerian odalisques, nostalgic views of colonial splendor and indigenous squalor, bold photographs of the Algerian war, images of destruction in an immigrant neighborhood in Marseilles, and shots of small-town folks in Morocco and multi-ethnic youth in France |