15 (1) Jennifer Yee 13/1/04 10:56 am Page 1

French Cultural Studies

Recycling the ‘Colonial Harem’?

Women in Postcards from French Indochina

JENNIFER YEE
University of Newcastle

While there has been relatively little serious analysis of colonial

postcards, Malek Alloula’s influential book Le Harem colonial put
forward a reading of such postcards from the early 1900s as perpetuating
a harem fantasy through which French male colonists viewed North
Africa. This article analyses a selection of postcards of women from
France’s Indochinese colonies at the same period, and suggests that
Alloula’s thesis does not fit them in a comparable way. The Indochinese
postcards borrow frames of reference from pre-existing pictorial styles,
taken sometimes from the harem but also from chinoiserie and
contemporary European photographic portraiture; rather than portraying
a single vision of the ‘Other’ they oscillate between showing the Indo-
chinese woman as ‘same’ and ‘different’. And these images appear to have
been addressed primarily to a female collector, suggesting an intended
reading rather removed from Alloula’s vision of colonial postcards as
pornography.

Keywords: Colonialism; Harem; Indochina; Orientalism; Photography;

Postcards; Women

T he growth of European imperialism in the last decades of the nineteenth

century, corresponding with the spread of steam travel, was in many ways a
precursor of the globalization of our own era. The domination of the globe by
the imperial powers was built on new networks that shipped men and
information around the world with unprecedented rapidity. And the great
steamships also carried a relatively new breed of traveller, the tourist,
around whom a whole host of new industries arose. Among them was that

French Cultural Studies, 15(1): 005–019 Copyright © SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
www.sagepublications.com [200402] 10.1177/0957155804040405
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6 FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 15(1)

prime symptom of capitalist tourism, the picture postcard. Invented in

Austria in the 1860s, the postcard was authorized in France from 1872 and
became very popular after the Exposition Universelle of 1889 with cards of
the Eiffel Tower; French production rose steadily thereafter, reaching 8
million in 1899, 60 million in 1902 and 123 million in 1910 (Prochaska,
1989–90: 30; Kyrou, 1966: 7–11). The years 1900–1925 are sometimes known
as the ‘golden age’ of the postcard thanks to cheap new techniques of
reproduction that made the picture postcard a perfect symbol of what Walter
Benjamin calls ‘the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’
(Benjamin: 1936). In the early 1900s the sheer ‘repeatability’ of the postcard
made it a choice object for collection by the new middle classes. Facilitating
such collections, the world of the early picture postcards was extremely
ordered, each card having its place as one of a numbered series produced by
a particular photographic studio. Such cards also set out, in their own
humble way, to organize and classify the world, and French postcards were
generally divided into the categories of ‘Scènes’ (urban or rural) and ‘Types’.
Recent work, notably that of Panivong Norindr (1996) and Nicola Cooper
(2001), has reflected a new engagement with the study of visual cultural
artefacts from French Indochina, in particular looking at the Indochinese
sections of the colonial exhibitions and films on the theme of French
Indochina.1 There has also been considerable debate and analysis of post-
cards from France’s North African colonies; but although photographic studios
were established in all the main colonial centres, Indochinese postcards
have attracted much less critical attention.2 Yet the golden age of the
postcard, 1900–1925, corresponded with the height of the French colonial
presence in Indochina. Can such postcards tell us a different story from the
postcards produced in North Africa, or do they reproduce the same discourse?
To offer a partial answer to this question, I will look in particular at the
portrayal of ‘types’ of women in selected postcards from colonial Indochina
in the early 1900s. I will suggest that as the area had fallen under French
domination relatively recently, the photographic studios were confronted
with the problem of how to ‘see’ Indochina, and that they had recourse to
pre-established framing devices borrowed from elsewhere. But first, I will
look at one particular critical approach to early colonial postcards of women,
so that we can ask whether this North African model can be applied to our
Indochinese corpus.

Malek Alloula and the Harem colonial

In 1981 Malek Alloula published a collection of early colonial postcards
produced in North Africa under the title Le Harem colonial: images d’un
sous-érotisme, a volume that has recently been re-edited. Accompanying
reproductions of semi-clothed ‘mauresques’ dancing, reclining, gazing from
behind barred windows, or smoking a narguileh, Alloula’s text offers a
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JENNIFER YEE: RECYCLING THE ‘COLONIAL HAREM’? 7

critical reading of the colonial postcard from North Africa as ‘la mise en
œuvre par le moyen photographique du fantasme du harem, sa reprise dégradée
et dégradante’ (Alloula, 1981: 9). He sees the postcard as ‘le degré zéro de la
photographie’, in which ‘le sens préexiste à l’icône, à la représentation’: the
postcard does not reflect reality, it is an empty photo filled by discourse,
‘c’est du discours photographié’ (Alloula, 1981: 23). This constitutes a double
criticism of the colonial postcard, seeing it as degrading sexual fantasy on
the one hand and as non-representative of any external reality on the other.
Alloula’s polemical commentary on the postcards reproduced in his book
has inspired very different reactions. Barbara Harlow, in her introduction to
the English translation in 1986 follows Alloula in underlining that his
commentary on these images is a way of returning the postcard to its sender
and thus giving, at last, the Arab point of view and exorcizing the
destructive power of the evil gaze. Clearly, one might add, Alloula’s work
does not offer any parallel exorcizing of the male gaze that makes passive
sexual objects of half-naked women. Nor does everyone share Harlow’s
admiration: two French anthropologists working on images and representation,
Gilles Boëtsch and Jean-Noël Ferrié, more recently published their own
critique of Alloula’s thesis. Their criticism sets forward the following ideas:
(1) a photograph, though it reflects a mise en scène, can never be entirely
reduced to its ideological content and (2) a cultural product cannot be
accused of exercising ideological domination over a colonized people if it
does not have a direct effect on them, that is, if they are not the intended
readers of such a product. The postcard, they claim, simply places foreign
bodies within ‘un cadre maîtrisé par les normes occidentales de la
pertinence esthétique’, creating ‘des hybrides agréables à voir’ (Boëtsch and
Ferrié, 1995: 299, 302, 303). Still more critical of Alloula, though from a
feminist perspective rather than a reactionary ‘occidentalist’ perspective, is
the response of Marieke Bal. Interrogating the problematic nature of the post-
colonial (male) gaze and its repetition of the objectivization of the colonial
(female) subject, she suggests that Alloula’s conflation of aesthetic and erotic
judgements or ‘aestherotics’ in fact reiterates the same categories and
positions as his ‘opponents – the colonial photographer and his clients’ (Bal,
1991: 37).
Looking at a small selection of postcards from Indochina, this article
questions Alloula’s conception of popular colonial imagery as a pornographic
fantasy of harem life. Certainly, Boëtsch and Ferrié’s contention that there is
no cultural imperialism exercised by postcards since they were not intended
to be seen by the colonized populations should not distract us from the
essential fact that colonialism exists in the minds of the colonizing
population as well as in the minds of the colonized. I will however follow
Boëtsch and Ferrié in suggesting that the photographer seeks a frame of
representation drawn from western aesthetic norms. I will read the examples
selected along two different lines that can usefully be described in terms of
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8 FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 15(1)

Jakobson’s syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes, the axis of combination that

will help us to read the postcard as suggestive of a narrative, and the axis of
selection that is of course linked to the ‘recycling’ of pictorial codes
suggested by my title. This double analysis will, I hope, shed light on the
mechanisms of cultural borrowing through which Indochina was portrayed
as belonging to the more general discourses of orientalism. And finally, in
response to Bal’s critique I will attempt briefly to evoke the presence of a
new character in this exchange: the turn-of-the-century French female
collector.

* * *

French cultural contact with Indochina, though dating back to missionaries

in the seventeenth century, had not made the French public familiar with a
specific pictorial tradition, thus failing to provide a visual frame of reference
through which the colonizers could ‘see’ Indochina. The novelist and
journalist Paul Bonnetain lamented, in 1884:
. . . tout écrivain sait faire vivre l’Afrique, l’Inde ou l’Amérique du Sud
sous les yeux de son public. [. . .] En Indo-Chine, la tâche du voyageur est
autrement âpre, autrement difficile. Artiste, il se désespère devant des
laideurs ternes et étiolantes; conteur, il se bat les flancs devant
des excentricités nécessitant, pour être dépeintes, le style d’un manuel
Roret, avec notes au bas des pages et figures dans le texte! . . . (Bonnetain,
1884: 220)
The lack of pre-established frames of reference thus created a difficulty of
seeing Indochina. One of the ways around this dilemma was to adopt other
pictorial codes, inherited from older traditions of exoticism, and the first
postcard I will look at is an example of this ‘recycling’.

The harem theme transferred to Indochina

Figure 1 shows a trio of women on a bench in the photographer’s studio. The
image can first be read syntagmatically, as a double discourse of eroticism
and ethnography. Its display of feminine flesh through a clumsy composition of
awkwardly raised leg and still more awkwardly denuded breasts, along with
the multiplicity of bodies on display, suggests availability. The caption, on
the other hand, uses ethnographic discourse to offer a reading of the image
as a depiction of local customs, and its didactic motive is highlighted by the
use of the term Kédillot. As Alloula puts it, in his discussion of North African
images, the project of such a postcard is thus to maintain, ‘dans un brouillage
constant (la ruse), une triple instance: celle de l’aveu (l’ethnographie), celle du
non-dit (l’idéologie coloniale), celle du refoulé (le fantasme)’ (Alloula, 1981:
23). On the other hand, a paradigmatic reading of this image reveals that it
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JENNIFER YEE: RECYCLING THE ‘COLONIAL HAREM’? 9

Figure 1. ‘90 B. TONKIN – Femme fumant le Kédillot (pipe commune)’.

Cliché Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

belongs to various series. The first of these is of course evoked explicitly by

the caption: the image is number ‘90 B’, belonging to a specific series which
is itself the product of a particular photographic studio. In other words the
postcard belongs to a paradigm within which it is itself merely a fragment of
a whole, to be pieced together by the individual collector.3 The ‘légende’ also
claims to refer to a single ethnographic truth situating an essentialist ‘race’ or
people. In fact the sheer sameness of the Other is central to the double
discourse of these postcards, which reassuringly posit the Other as belonging
to a recognizable ‘type’ that can be labelled, classified and collected. Nor is
this reassuring sameness so very removed from the pornographic. The classi-
fication of the world implicit in the ethnographic discourse underlying the
colonial postcard is far from incompatible with the suggested collection of the
world, and such a collection can itself easily have, as Alloula suggests, a sub-
text of sexual appropriation. In 1903 the libertine travel writer Jean d’Estray
published a book called Petits quarts d’heure amoureux d’Extrême-Orient
that recounted his experiences among the prostitutes and girl-children of
Asia. After many such encounters, he tells how he summons a female
musician who has attracted his increasingly blasé eye, but is disappointed
when she is delivered to his doorstep and he finds her the same as all the
others: ‘c’est un exemplaire de la femme annamite, édition varietur tirée à
deux ou trois cent mille exemplaires’ (D’Estray, 1903: 240–1). In D’Estray’s
narrative Asian women are all fundamentally the same, all available to be
bought or taken and all practically indistinguishable. The metaphor he uses
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10 FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 15(1)

Figure 2. ‘310 A Jeune Mauresque et Femme Kabyle. ND Phot’.

Postmarked Oran, 1906. Author’s collection.

is in itself a telling one: the era of mechanical reproduction has perhaps

devalorized the book; the era of global travel has certainly devalorized the
encounter with the ‘Other’.
But this postcard, I would suggest, also draws directly on codes of
reference taken in fact from the North African cards that form Alloula’s
corpus. The failed attempt to evoke languorous lesbian sexuality and
fantasized feminine availability can thus best be understood by a
comparison with a typical North African image such as the second postcard,
‘Jeune Mauresque et Femme Kabyle’. This image uses particular codes of
portrayal that are recognizably the same as those described by Alloula, and
which have been put into use for the Indochinese image too. The clearly
signalled availability, and above all the use of sensuous female plurality was
part of the harem theme, and followed what Alloula calls ‘un principe de
duplication’ according to which the photographer will always prefer to show
several women rather than one, suggesting ‘le saphisme oriental’ and
constructing the harem as a universe of feminine frustration and availability
to the absent male viewer (Alloula, 1981: 12, 64). Many of these images
showed women, reclining as here, smoking the narguileh, one of the
essential props of orientalist imagery which is replaced by the kédillot in the
Indochinese postcard. Although it was very unusual for Western men to be
allowed into real harems, this seemed only to increase the desirability of
images staging such imagined scenes. These popular portrayals of ‘harem’
images repeat a particular ‘colonial phantasm’ (Norindr, 1996: 17) that is in
fact inherited from an older orientalist tradition in which the Turkish
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JENNIFER YEE: RECYCLING THE ‘COLONIAL HAREM’? 11

Figure 3. ‘68– Une Bayadère Annamite. Planté, Éditeur, Saïgon’.

Handwritten notation ‘Saïgon 11 juin 1906’. Author’s collection.

seraglio played the role of Ur-model for this trope of exotic feminine
plurality and availability. The peculiar clumsiness of the Tonkinese scene
can best be understood as the result of an attempt to transfer this orientalist
fantasy to a new and even less appropriate context: its very failure as an
image is revelatory of an attempt at recycling imagery.
An even more striking – though rather more charming – example of this
transfer of orientalist pictorial codes can be found in figure 3, showing a
postcard with the caption ‘Une Bayadère Annamite’ which, like the North
African card, dates from 1906. It shows a young girl in a long robe and –
curiously enough – stockings, as well as jewellery and slippers, reclining on
a sofa and playing with a fan. These elements set up a syntax that can be
read relatively simply in terms of playful feminine availability in a luxurious
interior.
The posture and the sofa belong to the harem paradigm, in which the
main purpose of the raised arms was to display half-naked breasts.
Intriguingly, the caption in this case does not evoke the ethnological pretext
that recurs in the majority of colonial postcards of ‘types’: it reads instead,
‘68 – Une Bayadère Annamite’. Now the term bayadère originally referred to
one of the sacred dancers of India but, popularized by Romantic exoticism, it
had become commonplace enough to appear in Flaubert’s dictionary of
‘idées reçues’: ‘Bayadère. – Mot qui entraîne l’imagination. Toutes les
femmes de l’Orient sont des bayadères (v. odalisques).’ The sacred dancer
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12 FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 15(1)

thus merges with the reclining

odalisque of orientalism.4 Like our
first image, this postcard thus reflects
a borrowing or recycling of older
orientalist paradigms. And yet there
is also another visual code at work
here, which can help to explain the
black stockings, the long sleeves, the
comfortable bourgeois sofa, and even
the playful, teasing air: these
belong to the European society
lady. This image thus fits into several
– apparently contradictory – paradigms:
the Indian bayadère, the erotic
mauresque, and the languid but
playful European grande dame.

Other transferred codes – Chinese art

Our next Indochinese example, on
the other hand, takes us away from
the Orientalist paradigm of the harem.
Figure 4. ‘5 – Jeune Fille Annamite. Cliché M. The syntax of the image suggests a
Perray. Reproduction interdite.’ narrative: the photo represents a girl
Author’s collection. walking beside a misty lake who
protects herself from the rain with
her bamboo umbrella and pauses to rest on some rocks. And the caption
below the image reads ‘5 – Jeune Fille Annamite’, the number reiterating the
fact that the object belongs to a whole series of ‘jeunes filles annamites’ that
it would be possible to sample.5
Yet the staging of the image draws on a very different frame of reference, far
from both the paradigms of ethnography and the harem. The background of this
photograph is a painted backdrop of a water scene, with rocks piled in front of
it on the flat floor of the photographic studio. This setting evokes the world of
Chinese painting and the umbrella echoes Chinese parasols from countless
portrayals of court ladies. Unlike the first two examples, this image thus draws
upon Chinese art as its dominant pictorial model. Yet it is striking that neither
of the pictorial codes used in this hybrid image – Chinese or Western painting –
would normally permit a posture such as the girl has taken here, sitting with
her knees wide apart: in Chinese codes, such a posture would only have been
taken by a prostitute. Coupled with the stern, slightly hostile gaze of the young
girl, this confident posture and the firmly planted feet, distinctly free of any
Chinese-style binding, give the image a certain presence that goes well beyond
the intended westernized ‘chinoiserie’.
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JENNIFER YEE: RECYCLING THE ‘COLONIAL HAREM’? 13

Figure 5. ‘1402. COCHINCHINE – Saïgon – Figure 6. ‘300. COCHINCHINE – Femme de

Femme de Saïgon’. Postmarked Long-Thanh Saïgon. Collection P. Dieulefils Photographe,
1906. Author’s collection. 53, rue Jules Ferry à Hanoï’. Postmarked
Saïgon 1905. Author’s collection.

Codes transferred from Europe: the portrait

Yet another, very different, set of pictorial codes can be seen at work in a
whole series of postcards, of which the following examples are a small
selection.6 Far from presenting women in terms of sexual availability, these
postcards set up the codes of social respectability by echoing the European
photographic portrait.
Figure 5 is apparently a portrait of a young girl standing beside a table in
the photographer’s studio. The painted backdrop shows tropical plants and
flowers, and the props suggest a wealthy bourgeois interior: she is standing
on a patterned carpet; her right hand is placed on a carved Chinese box on a
table covered with an opulently patterned cloth; an elegant Chinese vase,
and a parasol in her left hand, complete the picture. The pose is in many
ways oddly familiar to us: the formal portraits of nineteenth-century
photography often adopted this frontal, full-length pose, with a similarly
serious gaze. A syntagmatic reading thus suggests ownership, bourgeois
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14 FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 15(1)

comfort and cultivation. And the paradigm, to a large extent, is that of

contemporary European portrait photography. Yet the caption suggests that
this is not an individual portrait, but simply a ‘Femme de Saïgon’, and
number 1402 in a collection. Moreover, the image is part of a series, and
beyond it is an entire paradigm of such portraits. It can thus be compared
directly to postcard 6: here, the young girl is seated, again in a posture
recognizable from European portrait photography and which was far from
typical in a country where chairs were not commonly used. Yet though the
pose is different, it is the same girl. The painted backdrop, the table and
heavy tablecloth, the carved box, even the parasol now leaning negligently
against the table, are the same. The girl’s dress is different, but her jewellery
is the same. The foot of the same white vase is just visible on the left. Clearly
the same model and props have been used to provide a slightly different
image, one indeed of a series of almost indistinguishable ‘femmes de
Saïgon’. In fact this is not a portrait of an individual, but an image that
stages, or performs, Indochinese bourgeois respectability. These ‘portrait’
postcards create a tamed version of exoticism, establishing what could in
some ways be called an anti-exotic aesthetics. These images, read syntag-
matically, tell of young women of means, in comfortable cultivated interiors.
They can be read within the paradigm of other such photographic images:
that is, the portraits of the French middle-class postcard-collecting young
lady. This myth asserts the sameness and equivalence of the bourgeois
feminine experience as it is lived in France and in France’s distant colonies.
And yet at the same time the captions affirm that the subject here is not in
fact individual but general: they are representations of ethnographic ‘types’,
and also objects to be collected.
Such images have a direct equivalent in a literary figure that could be
called, from the title of a novel by Myriam Harry first published in 1901, the
‘petite épouse’. The ‘petite épouse’ or ‘congaï’ was the native mistress taken
by a colonizer to run his household and furnish his bed. Myriam Harry, like
many male novelists, tells stories inspired by the figure of the ‘congaï’ that
repeat the same basic theme, in various different ways: the native, morganatic
wife, has a practical and a sexual function to fulfil, but the colonizer’s
relationship with her is always false, an unsatisfying and inadequate
replacement for a ‘true’ marriage with a Frenchwoman. Thus in a novel
called Mademoiselle Moustique, mœurs tonkinoises, Eugène Jung (1895: 229,
231). writes of the congaï as a ‘Joujou toujours gai, petit animal qu’on aimait
à couvrir de bracelets, de colliers d’or, de crépon et de soie brochée’, but
mocks the idea that she could be a rival for a fiancée left behind in France:
‘Comme si le petit meuble amusant que j’avais dans la maison pouvait
remplacer l’absente!’ In another novel, Jean d’Estray (1905: 204) describes
the heroine as having the allure of ‘une petite congaï, voulant jouer à la vraie
femme, comme nos fillettes cherchent à ressembler à leurs grandes sœurs’.
The reader can both recognize signs of a ‘common’ femininity and be
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JENNIFER YEE: RECYCLING THE ‘COLONIAL HAREM’? 15

comforted by the confirmation that she

– for the intended reader often seems to
have been a woman – is incomparably
above such a creature who can only
hope to echo ‘real’ womanhood in
much the same way that a toy, a small
animal, a piece of furniture or a little
girl dressing up can. This colonial
mimicry is in fact reassuring to the
reader/viewer; as Homi Bhabha (1994:
86, 92, his emphasis) puts it, ‘colonial
mimicry is the desire for a reformed,
recognizable Other, as a subject of a
difference that is almost the same, but
not quite.’ This ambivalence of the
colonial gaze produces a slippage in
which the Other is ‘not quite’ and ‘not
white’.
The colonial postcards using the
‘portrait’ motif are excellent illustrations
of this colonial ambivalence. ‘Not
quite/ not white’, these images perform
Figure 7. ‘71 – Une congaï Annamite. Planté, middle-class respectability in a luxurious
éditeur, Saïgon’. Postmarked Long-Thanh interior but simultaneously reaffirm
1908. Author’s collection.
exotic difference, coded in terms of
objects – the carved box, the vase – belonging to the already familiar and
reassuring exoticism of ‘chinoiserie’. This in turn raises the question of the
identity of the viewer: for whom was this myth of middle-class respectability
intended?
A partial answer can be provided by simply turning over the cards. Let us
look briefly at a third example of a ‘respectable portrait’, in which it is now
no surprise to see a painted backdrop of a luxurious European interior, a
European chair, and a young model in rich clothing and jewellery with a
pose of confident ownership.
Although the style is somewhat different, the myth being portrayed is very
much the same as that of examples 5 and 6. If we now turn the card over, we
learn that it was sent to a Mademoiselle Lucienne Verdan, in Haute Savoie.
In fact my collection includes two such cards, almost identical (‘71 – Une
congaï Annamite’ and ‘66 – Une riche Annamite’) that were sent to the same
woman. In other words, this image was chosen to appeal to a woman. What
of the other cards we have seen? one of the other portraits (‘300.
Cochinchine – femme de Saïgon’) is addressed to ‘Mademoiselle Hauyyell,
employée des postes’ in Gaillac. And the Bayadère card is addressed to
‘Madame V. Ferrou’, Agen. In fact all the Indochinese postcards in my
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16 FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 15(1)

Figure 8. Same, other side. ‘Mademoiselle Lucienne Verdan

Rue du Pont, Bonneville (Haute Savoie)’

(admittedly small) collection of images of women either have no addressee

or a female addressee. Perhaps, then, these ‘respectable’ portraits of young
women have a function very far removed from Alloula’s pornographic
‘album’. It is tempting to develop a hypothetical distinction between
discourse in postcards from different colonies, which would suggest that the
harem theme encouraged a ‘pornographic’ masculine correspondence from
North Africa while the more respectable Indochinese phantasmatic
encouraged correspondence with women. Such a hypothesis would of
course need to be pursued in further research, taking it beyond the bounds of
the present essay. It is worth noting, however, that while postcard 2, the
‘harem’ image from North Africa showing bare breasts, is addressed to a
‘Monsieur Jules Roch’, the message itself reads ‘Mes sincères amitiés, Marie’,
casting some doubt on the entirely masculine and pornographic nature of
this correspondence. In any case, the ‘portrait’ postcards from Indochina
serve a very different purpose: they hold up a distant, deforming mirror to
the French collectionneuse. There is a subtle dialectic here between identi-
fication with the sitter and reaffirmation of difference, that encapsulates one
of the most problematic aspects of the relation with the Other.

Framing the Other: Sexual Object or Refracting Mirror?

Colonial postcards, entering the albums and the minds of their recipients,
had an important role to play: not only did such cards offer a popularized,
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JENNIFER YEE: RECYCLING THE ‘COLONIAL HAREM’? 17

pseudo-ethnographic inventory, or classification of the world, but at the

same time they adopted recognized pictorial codes in an attempt to interest
and charm the French public – a public that was not always spontaneously
in favour of colonial conquest (Mandery, 1995: 292). But was the colonial
postcard primarily an erotic object, subjecting the Other to the violence of
the pornographic gaze, as Alloula’s analysis suggests? Rebecca J. DeRoo
(1998: 145, 152) has already pointed out one of the problems with Alloula’s
approach, namely that he ‘over-generalizes the metaphor of sexual conquest
and overly delimits both the audience of the cards and their meanings:
penetration and possession imply that the viewers and collectors were
heterosexual males’. She goes on to underline that a tradition of female
collectors of postcards was well established by the early 1900s. Naomi Schor
(1992: 211) has also pointed out the association of postcards with the
feminine. Certainly, the small selection we have seen suggests that what
Alloula terms the ‘refoulé’, the repressed sexual fantasy, is an adequate
reading only for some such cards. Indochina is packaged and presented,
certainly, but not only for the male gaze; perhaps just as often these images
narrate a phantasmatic Indochina for the women left at home. To do this, the
photographic studios draw on a variety of visual paradigms, adopting pre-
existing frames of reference through which to tell their stories. The use of
familiar pictorial codes allowed the presentation of difference as both
infinitely repeatable, essential and at the same time containable. This
portrayal of Indochinese women via familiar codes, containing their
difference within the known and recognizable, allowed the female viewer, in
DeRoo’s words (1998: 154), ‘to mobilize a tactical identification’.
What is in some ways most striking about these images is the fact that
they are so obviously the product of belle époque France. As Christian
Maurel (1980: 20) puts it in his study of colonial exotic photography, some
of the women ‘ont l’air de poser dans l’atelier d’un peintre bourgeois un peu
décadent’. The bayadère postcard is a case in point, telling its story of a
voluptuous bourgeois interior in a way that appears almost tongue-in-cheek.
Is the photographer offering an ironic commentary on Flaubert’s idée reçue
of the oriental bayadère? And does the mischievous girl share some of the
pleasure of masquerading as a society lady who is posing as an Oriental
Odalisque and calling herself an Indian dancer? It is certainly hard, gazing at
a photograph such as this one, to adhere to Boëtsch and Ferrié’s affirmation
that the real – that is an unreconstructed, pre-semiotic truth – subsists in all
photographs. Rather, it appears that the material ‘fact’ of these Indochinese
women is reconstructed through a series of borrowed frames of reference
that recycle various more familiar colonial phantasms. In this era of
mechanical reproduction and global traffic, not only are objects – books,
photographs – mass-produced, but codes of reference themselves are also
traded, reproduced and exchanged with increasing rapidity from one
geographical sphere to another.
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18 FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 15(1)

Notes
An earlier version of this article was presented as a paper at the Twentieth-Century French
Studies Colloquium, University of Illinois, 28 March 2003. My thanks go to Jane Bradley
Winston, who organized the panel that day, and to Kathryn Robson, Alison Hardie and Mary
Jean Green for their helpful comments.

1. The term ‘Indochina’ will be used without scare quotes throughout, but it is itself far from
being unproblematic; see, for example, Norindr (1996): 17–20.
2. The main exception is an earlier publication, of great interest to collectors but with little
theoretical content: Noury, J., L’Indochine avant l’ouragan, 1900–1920 (Chartres:
Imprimerie Charron, 1984; re-edited 1992).
3. On the postcard as an object of collection, with its surrounding apparatus of collectors’
magazines, journals, albums, societies, see for example Prochaska (1989–90), 29–30.
4. ‘Dictionnaire des idées reçues’ in G. Flaubert, Bouvard et Pécuchet (Paris: Garnier-
Flammarion, 1966), p. 337. The spelling bayadère entered French in 1782 following the
earlier form balliadère, 1770, from the Portuguese bailadeira, from bailar, to dance (Petit
Robert). In the relatively new world of French Indochinese fantasy, the bayadère of the
1900s may also evoke the Apsaras, the winged dancers of the Khmer temples at Angkor,
and perhaps also the court dancers of the Cambodian King Sisowath who in fact visited
France that same year (1906) and were famously sketched by Rodin.
5. The ethnographic pretext of the caption can be compared to the famous African
collection of Fortier with its captions: ‘1384 Afrique Occidentale. Étude no. 63 Fille
Soussou’ or ‘1078 Afrique Occidentale. Jeunes femmes Diolas.’ (Bibliothèque
Nationale, Estampes). For details on Fortier see David, P., ‘Fortier, le
maître de la carte postale ouest-africaine’ in Notes africaines, 166 (avril
1980), 29-37.
6. There are numerous similar examples in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Estampes.

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Jennifer Yee is a lecturer at the University of Newcastle. Address for

correspondence: School of Modern Languages, University of Newcastle,
Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU. e-mail Jennifer.Yee@ncl.ac.uk