Malek Alloula’sthe Colonial Harem (1986): Colonial Gaze And Postcolonial Response

Résumé: The present dissertation has provided a postcolonial study of MalekAlloula’sThe Colonial Harem (1986). The central focus of this work is Alloula’s response to and deconstruction of the French colonial gaze and the myth of the harem and the Algerian women .To achieve my purpose, I have borrowed Edward Said Postcolonial criticism on Orientalism by making appeal to a set of approaches and theories combined with it. I have appropriated Roland Barthes’ and Susan Sontag’s deconstruction of photography, Laura Mulvey’s psychoanalytic approach to the male gaze in visual culture, Frantz Fanon’s approach to the veil, and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis. After I have analysed Alloula’s work, I have come to two conclusions. The first conclusion is that Alloula writes back to the colonial discourse and returns the postcards to their sender with a reading that combines different theoretical tools. My second conclusion is that Alloula attaches the colonial gaze with the male gaze structured with unconscious structures to say that the distorted images of The Algerian women are only the result of male phantasms and desires and thus the French postcards do not reflect the true Algerian women.

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