Clothing in Postcards of Algerian and Moroccan Women In many ways, garments were a marker of disparity between Vietnamese and North African colonial portraiture. In Algeria and Morocco, postcards were often organized around the veiled—or rather, unveiled—woman, a theme central to Orientalist art and photography. Colonialist photographers, such as Jean Geiser, Rudolf Lehnert and Ernst…
Author: Marie Robin
Marie Robin is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Columbia University, where she studies gender, race, sexuality, and military culture in the 20th-century French Empire. Her doctoral dissertation assesses the role, transformation, and ramifications of the French military’s sexual management policies during decolonization in the First Indochina War (1946-54) and the Algerian War (1954-62). Using a gender lens, the dissertation explores the Bordel Militaire de Campagne (Mobile Field Brothels), the French system of military prostitution sanctioned by the French government for its troops and sustained by the sexual labor of indigenous women and girls. Marie holds a BA in History and Middle-Eastern Studies from the American University of Paris (2017) and an MA in History from Durham University (2018).
Representations and Discourses of Indochinese and North African Women in French Colonial Postcards (1880s-1920s), Part I
In the opening of his influential book Orientalism, Edward Saïd exposed the dominance and hegemony of Western authors and artists in shaping and formulating the fundamental narratives about the ‘Orient’, emphasizing the binary and self-consolidating character of colonial discourse: A very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and…
“A Hallowed Institution”: The Bordel Militaire de Campagne (Mobile Field Brothels) and the Making of Military Prostitution in France Following World War One
Reflecting on the French system of military prostitution known as Bordels Militaires de Campagne (BMC, Mobile Field Brothels) during the First World War, Dr. Léon Bizard wrote in his memoirs (1925): It was a mêlée, a hard, dangerous, and disgusting business. Fifty, sixty, up to a hundred men of all colors and races to relieve…