“Stories at War: The Mission to Save Muslim Women between Colonial and Native Narratives”
Wednesday 13 October 2021, 5.30PM
Speaker(s): Professor Zahia Smail Salhi, University of Manchester
About the event
According to Walter Benjamin a story, “… does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time”. This lecture brings into discussion and analysis a wide array of stories told by different actors about native Algerian women. The stories we discuss in this lecture were produced in the nineteenth century, and are deployed herein as a portfolio of narratives that tell the same story albeit from multifarious angles and perspectives.
We begin by reading colonial images as phantasmagorical stories about native women as told by Orientalist artists and colonialist photographers. Set in imagined Orientalist decors these image-stories aimed to reproduce the world of the Arabian Nights rife with odalisques cloistered in harems for the pleasure of their lascivious masters. Every image invites you to weave your own story and to listen to the mute silhouettes of the represented women. Gazing on these image-stories one often wonders, what story would these women tell if they were able to speak/write?
We then compare these mute image-stories with a selection of written stories recorded by war ethnographers and army officers as testimonies on colonial violence against these same native women. Theirs are horror stories, which allow present time readers to question the civilising mission of the French conquerors in contrast to the barbaric practices of the conquest.
Moving away from these male narratives, the lecture discusses in juxtaposition the story of the women of Algeria as told by French feminist Hubertine Auclert in her book Les Femmes arabes en Algérie, and a counter story to hers written by Fadhma Aït Mansour Amrouche, as the story of her life, Histoire de ma vie. In these female her/stories the two respective authors speak from opposing positions; that of the coloniser and that of the colonised.
Bringing these two contrasting sets of stories into discussion will enable us to evaluate the extent to which native women were central to French women’s agenda of ‘saving them’, and assess the extent to which they were saved.
About the Speaker
We begin by reading colonial images as phantasmagorical stories about native women as told by Orientalist artists and colonialist photographers. Set in imagined Orientalist decors these image-stories aimed to reproduce the world of the Arabian Nights rife with odalisques cloistered in harems for the pleasure of their lascivious masters. Every image invites you to weave your own story and to listen to the mute silhouettes of the represented women. Gazing on these image-stories one often wonders, what story would these women tell if they were able to speak/write?
We then compare these mute image-stories with a selection of written stories recorded by war ethnographers and army officers as testimonies on colonial violence against these same native women. Theirs are horror stories, which allow present time readers to question the civilising mission of the French conquerors in contrast to the barbaric practices of the conquest.
Moving away from these male narratives, the lecture discusses in juxtaposition the story of the women of Algeria as told by French feminist Hubertine Auclert in her book Les Femmes arabes en Algérie, and a counter story to hers written by Fadhma Aït Mansour Amrouche, as the story of her life, Histoire de ma vie. In these female her/stories the two respective authors speak from opposing positions; that of the coloniser and that of the colonised.
Bringing these two contrasting sets of stories into discussion will enable us to evaluate the extent to which native women were central to French women’s agenda of ‘saving them’, and assess the extent to which they were saved.
About the Speaker
Professor Zahia Smail Salhi is Chair of Modern Arabic Studies at the University of Manchester. She specialises, among other things, in Women and Gender, and Post-colonial Literature of the Middle East and North Africa with special focus on the Maghreb and Saudi Arabia. She served as Co-Director of the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World (2013- 2016), and as a Member of Sub-panel 27 (Area Studies: Research Excellence Framework: REF 2014), and is currently a Member of Sub-panel 25 (REF 2021). She is also a member of the British Academy project Imagining the Future: Engaging young people on environmental challenges to create new and sustainable livelihoods in Algeria (2019-2022).
Any questions at all, please feel free to contact Siham Akaka (sa1873@york.ac.uk). We look forward to seeing you there!
Location: CWS students and staff should be able to see this event (with the Zoom link inside) on their Google Calendar timetable. If you're unable to see or access the session, please email (cws@york.ac.uk)