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" Moving pictures: Gender, vision, and travel from colonial Algeria to contemporary France "
Laura Jane Loth
E. B. Sivert
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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| Record Number
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52473
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TL22427
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3198115
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| Main Entry
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Laura Jane Loth
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| Title & Author
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Moving pictures: Gender, vision, and travel from colonial Algeria to contemporary France\ Laura Jane Loth
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| College
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University of Minnesota
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| Date
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2005
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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2005
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| Page No
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449
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| Abstract
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This dissertation, "Moving Pictures: Gender, Vision, and Travel from Colonial Algeria to Contemporary France," explores the construction of gender through visual representation in French colonial and postcolonial contexts. I examine a selection of texts spanning from nineteenth-century colonial travel narratives about Algeria to novels and memoirs published as recently as March 2005 by Franco-Algerian women writers, all of which use the mediating surface of the visual image to interrogate French identity and gender identity in relation to the former Algérie francaise. In the first chapter, I argue that Theophile Gautier's representations of gender and Oriental topics fluctuate between an almost post-modern articulating of the relativity and social-nature of such categories as gender and ethnicity, and a rigid dependence on the exotic feminine in order to explore the relativity of his own French masculinity. Chapter 2 considers the technology of vision as it emerges in Eugene Fromentin's travel novels, Un été dans le Sahara and Une année dans le Sahel. I use psychoanalytic theory to examine Fromentin's literary portrait of a subject having an ontological relationship to the visual. Chapter 3, informed by gender studies and feminist revisions of visual studies, analyses colonial French women's travel narrative as a space of tension between feminine spectatorship and masculine genre in which the founding myths of gender and nation come to the fore. Chapters 4 and 5 study colonial paradigms of gender in turn-of-the-century Algeria based on the writings and legend of Isabelle Eberhardt. Eberhardt is adopted by colonial French women writers and contemporary Algerian women writers as an emblem of gender and national transgression. In the final chapter, I examine how the works of contemporary Franco-Algerian novelists Leïla Sebbar and Assia Djebar reflect upon the relationship between the postcolonial spectator and the colonial image of Algeria in a neo-colonial setting. Informed by gender studies, narrative theory, feminist film theory, and postcolonial theory, this dissertation engages the significance of the movement of colonial images into a postcolonial context and analyzes how this migration of images challenges the coherence of the knowledge produced by the French colonial enterprise.
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Language, literature and linguistics; Algeria; Assia Djebar; Colonial; Djebar, Assia; Eberhardt, Isabelle; Eugene Fromentin; France; Fromentin, Eugene; Gautier, Theophile; Gender; Immigration; Isabelle Eberhardt; Leila Sebbar; Sebbar, Leila; Theophile Gautier; Travel literature; Romance literature; 0313:Romance literature
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E. B. Sivert
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University of Minnesota
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