Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

A wide range of French photographers whose aim was to discover an Orient situated only a few miles across the Mediterranean enhanced the French military conquest of Morocco in the beginning of the twentieth century. Visual representations have played an important role in the formation of French and western perceptions about North African people, history and identity. Postcards of colonial people reflect an intense obsession with documenting the ethnic Other as authorized by anthropological conventions. This wide array of visual categories of representation transmitted the very ideological messages of the essential rightness of colonialism, and “aided in the campaign to make empire a way of life”. This contribution seeks to address colonial issues in photographic representation about Moroccan women in order to explore how looking at images defines not only what is known about Morocco and Moroccan people, but also how that knowledge circulates in specific cultural contexts. It also attempts to explore different arguments and theories connected with the photographic representation of the female body in colonial and postcolonial visual documents and allows a discussion of a number of current historical photographic practices in colonial and postcolonial contexts, namely in Morocco.