Veiled Threats: Malek Alloula's Colonial Harem

Abstract

Malek Alloula's recent book about turn of the century French postcards picturing Algerian women, Colonial Harem, only one of an entire list of books published by the University of Minnesota Press in their Theory and History of Literature series which question the colonial mentality embodied but unrecognized in much of traditional Western literary criticism. By foregrounding theory, by treating material and literary cultural artifacts as texts and by focusing on the assumptions made by the writers and readers of these texts, the critics who participate in the Minnesota series-both authors and editors-call our attention to the representational nature of all language and all imaging. Paul Dienhart, in an article on the series and the people behind it at Minnesota entitled The Joy of Text, states that Alloula's book is part of something that's going to affect us all-alter the legal system, change the way universities are organized and knowledge taught,