6

A POSTCARD FROM THE ED6E

in which postcards, undeliver-

ablefor lack of a recent address,

can still be returned to sender

PLAYING GAMES

T
his chapter is about the com-
plicity of critique. It analyzes the impossibility of showing and saying "no" to the
object in the very gesture that shows it. Imagine you are visiting a small exhibi-
tion, say, at the Africa Museum in Berg en Dal near Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
It is called "The Colonial Imagination: Africa in Postcards." It consists of images.
Many of these images show women. Raymond Corbey, the curator of the show
 and author of the catalogue, a book-length study of these postcards, writes about
these representations. He makes it clear that he finds the women attractive, and,
it turns out, he finds their representations in the postcards objectionable. He
curated the exhibition in order to show—what exactly?
The postcards show how the colonial m a n at the beginning of this century
was fascinated by the sexual availability, at least visually, of the black women in
these pictures. The exhibition was meant as a visual critique of whitemale colo-
nialism. But did the visitors actually see this colonial man? Did they get to see
his ideology, visually? Or did they see, rather, in the first place or as the saying
has it, at first sight, just those women, attractive for them or not, but in any case
nude or semi-nude. Is the critique of the colonial visual practice a secondary
reaction which in fact legitimizes that looking?
Much of this kind of work has been recently put forward in the form of photo
essays, in the critical movement which posits the problematic nature of knowl-
edge of the other. In the previous chapter the focus was on the style of argu-
mentation and the expository m o m e n t therein. I will now address a strategy of
argumentation which is fundamentally expository: the quotation of evidence,
especially visual images used as illustrations. This strategy will be discussed in
view of the problem emanating from the speech act of exposing, which entails a
problematic of the expository agency, the subject doing the pointing.
The basis of the postcolonial critique of racist imagery is sometimes formu-
lated as the dilemma of objectivity versus historically framed vision.1 This move-
ment offers an ongoing critique of racist, sexist, and ethnocentrist tendencies,
196
not only in the culture of everyday life and in politics, art, and literature, but
DOUBLE EXPOSURES also in scholarship itself, that is, in the processes of acquisition of knowledge and
critical analysis.2
Attempts to solve this problem, at least in part, have tried to establish a tight
solidarity between knowledge of the other and self-knowledge, the latter in the
shape of self-reflection and subsequent self-critique. This chapter is based on the
notion that the need for self-reflection is acute for the use of illustrative, often
visual material as evidence in critical analyses, but also that self-reflection is par-
ticularly difficult to sustain against the pull of the image. What interests m e
most is the problem posed by the powerful effect of visual representation, its
perlocutionary effectivity. This effect does not disappear before a critical analy-
sis of the images that merely studies their constative messages. More impor-
tantly, it also affects the critic writing about them. The critic cannot help being
the expository agent, the pointing subject who shows the image, even if the
image is the object of this subject's negative analysis. You can show and critique,
but the gesture of showing itself is constative and bears no modal qualification;
it cannot say "no" to its own object.
Corbey's analysis of colonial postcards about "Africa," just like the one pub-
lished a few years ago by Malek Alloula (The Colonial Harem) about "Algeria,"
belong to a subgenre of the photographic essay. Whereas the photo essay can be
defined as a genre where text and photos are "coequal, mutually independent,
and fully collaborative," 3 the subgenre I will be discussing is the critical, antag-
onistic work where collaboration allegedly yields to critique. The text
denounces the photos, but the text writer is also the subject of the selection and
arrangement of the photos. Thus the writer is the agent of display. Unlike the
collaboration between writer and photographer in the p h o t o essay, the p h o -
tographers), often numerous and anonymous, never participated in the com-
position of the essay.
The publications under scrutiny raise an old problem inherent in critical cul-
tural analysis: doesn't one repeat the gesture of appropriation and exploitation
one seeks to criticize, if one reprints as quotations the very material whose use
by predecessors is subject to criticism? First taken up and sent home as the image
of the African other, the attractive bare-breasted woman is exhibited once more,
again because of her erotic attraction, albeit that the anthropologist or muse-
197
umgoer denies that the attraction addresses him. Instead, the blame is p u t on
the absent other of the scholar, the third person, the photographer or buyer of A POSTCARD

F R O M THE EDGE
the postcards. The scholar is not to blame; on the contrary, he o u g h t to be
praised for denouncing the abuse.
Something in this righteousness irritates many people because it is moralis-
tic. But the moral question has an important epistemological side. Is the quo-
tation fundamentally different from the gesture of the colonial predecessor? Is
scholarly neutrality and even critical analysis not a misguided, even disingenu-
ous excuse to let the insidious effect through, even to enjoy it?
The starting point of the critics is the power of the image. If these critics are
right in their claims that the postcards had a function in the p r o m o t i o n of
 colonial ideology, as I think they are, the underlying assumption is that visual
representation has a powerful effect of ostentation. But then, it is necessary to
think about that power, and to reflect on what happens to that power within
a different context. What I am trying to get at is the specific effect of exposing
and its power to overrule other speech acts, and to neutralize intent.

" B E A U T Y " A N D THE C R I T I C A L PROJECT

Let me suggest where the problem of these publications lies through the most
superficial, immediate aspect: the presentation of the book as a material object.
Although Alloula's book appeared in a series of serious, bare, scholarly books all
with the same unspectacular format, it deviates from that format. It is published
in a large size, horizontally. The postcards are beautifully reproduced larger-
than-lifesize, in their original sepia tones that connote exoticism and nostalgia.
The images proliferate: after a few pages of text, page after page reproduces the
images, which thus take on a life of their own. Like most coffee-table books, this
one can easily be browsed without being read.
The sheer number of images denotes visual pleasure, and thus provokes it in
the reader. Pleasure is not the problem, only the kinds of pleasure involved and
the channels through which it is triggered; the cost of it for the knowledge to
be produced. For that sense of visual pleasure before beautiful images bleeds
over into the critical text that precedes the images and leads up to them. In this
text, pleasure is presented in terms of aesthetics. Time and again, Alloula pro-
vides aesthetic judgments, like a Fuchsian curator. But these judgments, typi-
198
cally, spill over from one area into another: they c o m m e n t on the postcards,
DOUBLE EXPOSURES the poses, the w o m e n , their breasts, without thematizing the relationship
between those different judgments and their grounds.
The cover of this book is ornamented by one of the postcards praised in the
text. The praise is ambiguous, as it generalizes from this one picture to others
like it because "by their inherent aesthetic quality, [they] keep on renewing the
same pleasure: the one that lies at their origin, the frisson of which is carried
over from one variation to another" (52). The word "frisson" functions as the
semantic shifter that connects aesthetics to eroticism. The expository agent thus
endorses the combination of aesthetic and erotic pleasure the book sets out to
criticize in its object, the postcards.
 Similarly, Corbey's book, although less richly printed, partakes of the same
features: proliferation of images, sepia tones, and a well-selected image on the
cover. Both books as material objects convey not just attractive pleasure, but
the specific one yielded by the use of connotators of "pastness," with their aura
of innocence and the beauty produced by sheer time.
So, the academic use of this material in order to gain insight poses problems
that need to be addressed, not only in the text but also in the very gesture of
material reproduction and printing style. On the other hand, if we refuse to touch
this tricky stuff, the issue of the false representation of Africa, Algeria, and all the
other countries visited by colonialism, remains under-illuminated, and that of
the instillment of this visual ideology even in present fantasies unexamined. And
this issue is badly in need of criticism and understanding. The problem is that of
the exhibition of realistic, sexist material in the showcase of scholarship, sur-
rounding it with a protective belt of legitimizing aura. Within the context of the
analysis of exposition as a form of speech, I would like to raise the question: To
what extent is it effective to adopt illustrative material in a critical analysis of ide-
ologically fraught practices of representation, and if so, under what conditions? I
will proceed by analyzing Corbey's and Alloula's books along with Sander
Gilman's (in)famous article of 1985, published in the special issue of Critical Inquiry
devoted to "Race," Writing, and Difference, and later published as a book. Although
Gilman's article appeared in a progressive theoretical journal, and was edited by
a reputed African American critic, it has been the occasion of quite a bit of anger.4
All these publications have an explicit critical intent. But they have more in com-
mon than such good intentions. Most importantly, as their material makeup and 199

their intellectual contents demonstrate, they share an unspoken interest in A POSTCARD

beauty. That beauty, one might speculate, is what they want to show. F R O M THE EDGE

SHOWCASE

Gilman's article provides a clear entrance into the problem. Like the other
publications, it contains visual and verbal material, but since the frame of this
publication is a scholarly journal, not a book that can be attractive for a larger
public, it poses the problem of the power of images over words more sharply.
In order to understand this power I propose first to make a distinction, in
Gilman's discourse, between the overt argument and the subtext, a series
 of connotative statements so systematically sustained that they threaten to
take over.
The conflict is clear as early as the title: "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward
an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine,
and Literature." Let's read this title discursively. Overtly, Gilman sets out to
demonstrate the link established between black and white bodies and female sex-
uality in the iconography of the period. The subtext here is already quite differ-
ent, as can be demonstrated by the unstated implications. Two ideas are taken for
granted. First, that the bodies, indicated by color only, are female apparently goes
without saying; the implication is presented by the colon. Second, equally self-evi-
dent is the fact that the bodies "are about" sexuality. A third troubling feature is
generic: the phrase "toward an iconography" implies a descriptive, rather than a
critical project. The subject of writing implied in the term "iconography" remains
ambiguous: this could mean either the disciplines of the period, or the scholar
analyzing them. Both are possibilities, and the tradition of iconography in the dis-
cipline of art history suggests that the critic is at least also the subject of writing.
This overlap between critic and material is thus evident as early as the paper's title.
Like Gilman's title, the title of the exhibition in Berg en Dal conveys a dou-
ble message: "The Colonial Imagination: Africa in Postcards." In spite of the
stated critical intent, this title also says that the object of the exhibition, its epis-
temic theme, is Africa: for real. Quotation marks surrounding the name of the
continent would have helped. Alloula's title, "The Colonial Harem," with its
definite article suggesting the existence of what it presents, has the same ambi-
200
guity. For the casual reader picking this book up, it is not clear w h e t h e r the
DOUBLE EXPOSURES book is about a special variation of real harems, namely the colonial one, or
whether the harem is an invention of colonialism. Although the latter inter-
pretation is obviously intended and probably understood, the former is not
explicitly denied in the book and is therefore capable of coexisting with the lat-
ter. Of the publications selected for examination, Nederveen Pieterse's title
stands out as the only one that is explicit enough to preclude such subliminal
carry-over: White on Black clearly states that the following are views produced by
whites to represent blacks.
All three authors pursue a critical goal: in Gilman's case, to examine the
effect of ideology on the late nineteenth-century view of "female sexuality," and
the role of black women in that view. In his introduction, Gilman demonstrates
awareness of the problem at stake. Noticing the power of visual imagery he
writes that he has selected iconographic material, m u c h a m o n g it medical,
because these images demonstrate better than any other how the ideological
mechanism works:

They serve to focus the viewer's attention on the relationship between the portrayed
individual and the general qualities ascribed to the class. (204)

In other words, according to Gilman's overt argument, the generalization from

a (strong) case is the dubious point, and the suggestion is that visual images pro-
mote such generalizations.
That generalization is the very gesture which Gilman keeps repeating. He
can get away with it because his premise remains unstated: the assumption that
the reality of the individual strong case is sure beyond a shadow of a doubt. The
"portrayed" individual is, indeed, shown as "lifelike." Moreover, his own gen-
eralizations pass unnoticed because the effect of the visual nature of his mate-
rial remains undiscussed. The suggestion that visuality promotes generalization
from individual to class detracts attention from the imposition of an unexam-
ined mental image that visuality facilitates. We will see that this agent of point-
ing cannot remain out of reach of his own object.
Shortly after this opening Gilman writes that this is how difference is con-
structed:
201

The myth associated with the class, the myth of difference from the rest of human- A POSTCARD
ity, is thus, to an extent, composed of fragments of the real world, perceived through FROM THE EDGE

the ideological bias of the observer. (204; emphasis added)

To be sure, the discourse at this point is still critical. But the statement has a prob-
lem of focus, of thematization. The theme, the subject under scrutiny was the
generalization from individual to class. Hence, the suggestion that the individ-
ual case is a "fragment of the real world" is casually passed off. The synecdochic
logic—the same logic that constructed "artifacts" as different from "works of
art" in the division of museums—is put into place.
 This short introduction puts forward his critical alibi. The phrase "critical
alibi" is coined in analogy with Alloula's phrase "ethnographic alibi." Alloula
poses a triple discourse, and describes it as follows:

That at least is its [the postcard's] ethnographic alibi, its avowed purpose. But rather
than a contradiction, in the case of the colonial postcard, it would be better to speak
of a specific mode of operation that consists in the maintenance, though in constant
scramble (the ruse), of a triple agency: that of the avowal (ethnography), that of the
unsaid (colonial ideology), and that of the repressed [phantasm). (28)

As I will argue later, Alloula's distinction into three discursive strands is itself a
gesture of disavowal. Moreover, his notion of agency is confused, which leads
to statements about the photographer's "desire" that represses the capitalist
issue involved (see e.g., pages 68, 86, 96).
Gilman's analysis begins with the following sentence:

One excellent example of the conventions of human diversity... is the icon of the
Hottentot female and the icon of the prostitute. (206)

The remainder of the article is devoted to the connection between these two
images; hence, the introducing discourse bears close analysis. 5 The overt dis-
course aims at criticizing this connection. The subtext, however, generalizes in
several manners. "One excellent example" is only a first step, usual and, indeed,
202
inevitable in argumentation. But then, both images are presented in the singu-
DOUBLE EXPOSURES lar form, provided with the generic "the" which implies the posing of the reality
status of the two "types": the Hottentot female and the prostitute. The text sug-
gests that the only thing that's wrong is to think they are the same. But, of
course, prostitutes are individuals. The image Gilman is about to discuss is
not one of "the Hottentot female" but of a particular w o m a n , nicknamed
"Hottentot Venus," whose name is known.
At the end of this paragraph the critical perspective has become invisible, and
we read the emphatically neutral-sounding sentence:

How these two concepts were associated provides a case study for the investigation
 of patterns of conventions, without any limitation on the "value" of one pattern over
another. (206)

The generalization has now evolved from ideology to method. "The Hottentot
female" and "the prostitute" are two existing types between which connections
may or may not exist; the "values" are put in quotation marks.
Something similar happens in Corbey's book: the erotic quality of the images
is not put into doubt, and with an appeal to nature he even sets out to prove it;
the binary opposition that structures the colonial discourse is assigned univer-
sal status. In both Gilman's and Corbey's studies, the critic joins the position of
his object of analysis. It is as if, by pointing the finger at someone else's flaws, they
include themselves in the show. What if the show happens to be a peepshow?

THE S U B J E C T OF E R O T I C I S M

Alloula's position is slightly different, but perhaps not as radically different as he

would like to claim. Alloula is Algerian, hence, he is a member of the culture
which is mythified in the postcards. Appealing to identity politics, he claims a
status as insider:

What I read on these postcards does not leave me indifferent. It demonstrates to me,
were that still necessary, the desolate poverty of a gaze that I myself, as an Algerian,
must have been the object of at some moment in my personal history. (5)

203
In no way do I want to dismiss this statement from someone who was, effectively,
an object of a colonialist gaze. The insider's position claimed is ambivalent, A POSTCARD
though. As an Algerian the author rightly claims it, and his personal experience FROM THE EDGE

with the gaze that objectified and distorted him, too, makes him a subject of
writing radically different from the Western critic who has not experienced that
gaze. But if identity has that authority, then it is equally relevant that as a man,
Alloula does not have the experience of being the object of the particular sexual
gaze his book is about.
He demonstrates the conflict himself when he symptomatically joins the dis-
course of heterosexual-male eroticism. Thus, for example, he writes of the "pho-
tographic subject as such, who must be acknowledged to possess an undeniable
 power of attraction" (18; emphasis added), a statement very close to Corbey's
appeal to nature. Alloula puts his own erotic vision to work on a number of
occasions. This becomes sometimes almost explicit, for example, when he con-
demns a postcard for "breaking up the graceful extension of the legs" (78). For
whom are these legs graceful? Beauty is defined in terms of eroticism, that much
is clear. But who the subject of this erotic discourse is, leaves little to be guessed.
The postcard is not criticized for its politics but for the disturbance it causes in
the erotic-aesthetic pleasure.
Subjectivity in exposing shows itself often in negative terms. In these publi-
cations, it is often in the slightly mournful note of regret that we read the "I"
confess his feelings to a "you" construed, more often than not, in his image and
likeness. We can hear a resounding note of regret in near-satisfaction when
Alloula writes:

The extraordinary portrait on p. 121 or the fantastic surrealism of the postcard on p.

126 might be the figures of such a temptation if we could only forget their end. (116)

"If only . . . ": the images would be unproblematic if they did not happen to be
traces of colonial appropriation, is the implication here. These images: "Look at
them!" The two examples quoted here and thus pointed out, are striking indeed.
They are, respectively, a close-up of a bare-breasted woman, looking intensely
at the viewer (with complicity, some would argue, with contempt, others might
say); and the final "piece": a veiled woman whose eyes are heavily made up while
204
her breasts are bare—nothing else is visible.6 "If only": the gesture of pointing is
DOUBLE EXPOSURES accompanied by sentiment, and that sentiment is regret.
These two images are different from most of the others. Both examples are
arguably more explicitly erotic, the latter perhaps even pornographic, than the
average pictures in the book. In the nostalgic sigh "if only" we hear an "I" say
that the images ought to be seen detached from their "end." In other words,
"forgetting their end" is precisely what these publications might be doing, and
by exposing, they might stimulate the "you," the readers to do the same. The
illustrative material constitutes both the object of analysis and the illustration
of the argument. But according to the other function of illustration, they are
also the decoration of the text. The question is, are decorations subordinated to
the text, the argument they serve, or could that functional relation be reversed?
The objects are shown; they are "on show."

DE-DISTANCING

It needs pointing out that the material Gilman discusses, quotes, reproduces,
and repeats, is largely not erotic, as it is in the cases of Corbey and Alloula.
Instead, Gilman quotes a series of frightening testimonies of misogyny and
racism, and I don't have any doubt that the author is as offended by that as I am.
Under the guise of medical science, parts of female bodies have been drawn as
monsters. Gilman shows it, exposes these representations. Exposure is his stated
aim. And what is presented before our eyes? Deformed buttocks and deviant
genitals, supposedly characteristic of "the Hottentot female," form the corpus
of medical discourse from which Gilman quotes abundantly. "Look! Weren't
they bad, those nineteenth-century scientists!" But the open vaginas confront
the contemporary reader, frontally, on many a page.
It is not the visuality of the images as such that has this disturbing effect; their
visual accessibility only enhances it. Somehow, the "voice" of the expository
agent comes across, loudly, but sounding false. Visuality is not inherently prob-
lematic, but the eagerness to show is. One can be as much disturbed by the ver-
bal reveling of Edward Shorter in his book Women's Bodies (1991) as demonstrated
by crude descriptions of the diseases that befall female genitals. There, too, one
wonders what the narrator, acting like an expository agent, is actually doing.
In addition to medical texts and drawings, Gilman also quotes paintings and
205
fragments from literary fiction. The discourse aims to demonstrate that an
unwarranted link has been established between these monstrosities and the A POSTCARD
F R O M THE EDGE
Western white prostitute. But the reality of the monstrosities, the t r u t h status
of these objects of display as such is not once put into doubt. The subtext labors
to shed doubt on this link only, at the expense of the Hottentot woman. Her
alleged monstrosity is reconfirmed all through Gilman's text. And by means of
a repeated but not quite questioned connective logic, so is the monstrosity of
the prostitute, who remains reduced to a single type.
One symptom of this typification in Gilman's own discourse is the undis-
tinguished use of pairs of terms, serving as visual linkages. His discourse keeps
connecting "Hottentot" and "black" on the one hand, and "prostitute" and
 "sexualized female" on the other. That the Hottentot Venus has always been
exploited as a caricature should have cautioned Gilman to be a little m o r e
nuanced with his generalizations. Attributing these to the colonial subject with-
out putting forward an alternative subjectivity, a clearly defined subject of expos-
ing, seems an ineffective critical gesture. Similarly, there are ways in which you
can use terms like "prostitute" and "sexualized female" with too much unques-
tioned contempt, by the sheer repetition of them.
Similarly, Corbey gets caught in his own object. For example, he uses with-
out distinction "naked" and "erotic" on the one hand, and "sexual" and "male"
on the other. Both collocations produce identifications that seem utterly
unwarranted to me. But they surely draw up a picture of the speaker.
These collocations lead to scholarly absurdities as well as to offensive and
deceptive pronouncements. Let me give one example of Gilman's lack of dis-
tance between the object of his critique and his own pointing agency:

It is the black female as the emblem of illness who haunts the background of Manet's
Olympia.

I would like to stop at this statement. As was already visible in previous quotes,
there is something symptomatic about the insistent use of generic nouns and
the dehumanizing word "female" to refer to women. Even when you are point-
ing at the discourse of others, you cannot keep saying "the black female" as if
that were an effective way of speaking.
206
But what about the association, here, between black, women, and illness, for
DOUBLE EXPOSURES Gilman himself, according to this sentence and, we might fear, for quite a few
of his readers? The association and its projection upon the painting make a good
case for my argument that such collusions between scholar and object—the
nineteenth-century scholars, not the represented women—impoverishes schol-
arship and hinders the production of knowledge. I don't need to reproduce
Manet's famous painting here to suggest that the black woman, there, has never
struck me as particularly ill. She also has nothing monstrous about her, to my
mind at least. And far from being a passive object on display, she may have dis-
turbed contemporary viewers because of the personalized, almost intimate con-
tact she is establishing visually with the white woman in the painting. She does
not strike me as "haunting the background," either. Haunting seems an unnec-
essarily suggestive word, for which the speaker alone is accountable. And
although sitting behind the white woman's bed, the black w o m a n is an active
member of the cast of characters in the image, of w h o m there is m u c h m o r e
to say, as I will do later on. It might be just the opposite: Gilman, as prone as
the nineteenth-century critics to projecting racial expectations on the paint-
ing, may have been irritated unwittingly at not finding exactly what he had
learned to expect.
In addition to Olympia, Manet's painting Nana is quoted as evidence, a work
painted after Zola's novel Nana, which is also quoted by Corbey. In that novel
the figure of Nana largely embodies sexual availability and perversion, while also
representing the contradiction that betrays her alterity in the eyes of her cre-
ator. The unlikely combination of being a nymphomaniac and frigid, a m a n -
eater and a lesbian, Nana is the product of a fantasy that is passed off as a case
study on hereditary and social disease.
In Manet's painting of Nana, the lighthearted figure is represented with
ample buttocks sticking out. Gilman attributes this feature to Hottentot con-
nections. He calls it "a sign of the black hidden within." Of course, the associa-
tion is not impossible; association is everyone's private domain, and cultural
associations may or may not coincide with particular ones. But, as Eve Sedgwick
put it, "it takes one to know one" (1990).
Yet, Gilman next extends this association to the lesbian, and frankly beats both
Zola and Manet at it. He does so when he presents Zola's overtly and emphati-
207
cally lesbian figure as the victim of corruption by a "real" lesbian, her friend Satin:
"Nana's fall into corruption comes through her seduction by a lesbian" (237; my empha- A POSTCARD
sis). Gilman thus suggests that Nana, who, in the novel, had been surrounded FROM THE EDGE

and used by men until the episode in question—the only one where she is free
to follow her own desire—was the image of purity itself until this "fall."
Sexual exploitation by a male clientele seems not to enter into the category
of corruption, nor is the question addressed of who the subject of corruption
might be, a question which is typically evaded by the nominalization of the verb.
Clearly, if we take his discourse at its word, we can only conclude that it is
Gilman's discourse, not Zola's or Manet's, which endorses the view that pros-
titution is less corrupt than lesbianism.
 In his turn, Corbey simply repeats Gilman's gesture. He does so by formu-
lating the relation between Nana's way of life and her death as simple causality.
He wrongly seems to assume she dies of syphilis although the cause of death is
actually smallpox, and the way she contracted the disease unstated: "Nana, who
destroys herself morally and physically by her looseness" (152).7 In chapter 9,
where Manet's Olympia constitutes a dossier, I will return to the impulse of later
critics to repeat the words of their predecessors. Here, it matters that neither
critic appears to have a fresh m e m o r y of the novel. For how else could they
ignore Nana's explicit avowal of sexual indifference to men, and the way they
lead her into prostitution?
These remarks demonstrate that Gilman as well as Corbey, under the guise
of a critique of nineteenth-century ideology, have become the spokesmen of
that ideology. Significantly enough for our concern with exposition, the repeat-
edly lifted finger of denunciation, aping exposition as in "exposure," a gesture
that is enacted to warrant distance between the colonial and the scholar, does
not seem to work effectively against this "contamination." The most sympto-
matic detail in both publications is the very interest in Nana. True enough,
judged by late twentieth-century standards, this novel is highly dubious, and
might qualify as mildly pornographic; it certainly is strongly misogynist and
incoherently so. But it has n o t h i n g to do with the representation of black
women, nor does Manet's painting of Zola's heroine.
Thus both scholars show with m o r e accuracy than they appear to realize
what it is they are exposing. They demonstrate that their interests lie in the sex
208
rather than in the race part of the debate, but that the race is inevitably part of
DOUBLE EXPOSURES that. Looking at Manet's Nana, it becomes more and more hard to disentangle
from reveling in the figure's emphatic buttocks, and stopping at Zola's novel
provides an occasion to express the fear of lesbians and/as "man-eaters." Is it to
punish Nana for evoking this fear that Gilman judges it apt to quote fully the
necrophilic description of her putrefied face in death? The description has cer-
tainly nothing whatsoever to do with the subject of his paper. (In consistency
with my argument, I will not quote this passage once more.) Even Manet and
Zola were more self-critical in this respect. Manet's Olympia makes the voyeur
blush with her ruthlessly cynical look, and Zola's Nana proclaims her u n i n -
hibited preference for w o m e n . The jealous Count Muffat is squarely mocked
and laughed at in the novel. Manet's implicit male viewer/visitor is looked down
upon, and Zola's male character is swept aside. Seen from this perspective, the
male authors of Olympia and Nana were m o r e modest, but also espistemologi-
cally m o r e informative, than our t r i u m p h a n t critics. But then the question
remains: can the postmodern critic only be a cannibal who ignores the wildness
at his heart?
What, t h e n , is the function of the images in this story? Within Gilman's
shifting discourse the images can easily work as unbecoming confirmations of
the critic's dubious position. They illustrate, reconfirm, and reiterate, t h u s
embodying a positivistic belief in what one "sees with one's very eyes": "Look!"
But looking is not a semantically neutral activity. Looking as it is construed
by these publications hovers between erotic reveling in, and scientific positing
of, a particular version of "reality," and the latter is easily p u t forward as
an excuse for the former. Corbey thematizes that belief explicitly, thus
attempting to distance himself from the fatal complicity a la Gilman. But
when he reproduces and exhibits these postcards, he does so in order to use
t h e m as evidence.
Evidence of what exactly? Not of the savage femininity of "Africa" and
"Africans," but of the objectionable colonizing, meaning production, of the colo-
nial. The colonial is Corbey's savage. For him, then, the images are evidence, too.
And therefore, we are asked to look at them. And then we see, inevitably, those
bare breasts again, now legitimated by the raised finger of scholarly legalistics,
and by the blame put on our other, the predecessor of the enlightened anthro-
209
pologist. The discourse setting up the dichotomy between "I" and "other" is still
functioning. As I have demonstrated in previous chapters, the discourse of expo- A POSTCARD
sition cannot continue to hide its subjectivity and pretend it is just showing the FROM THE EDGE

real nature of what is "out there," the moral and aesthetic truths.
Reading many of these critical texts sensitizes one to the particular eroticiz-
ing discourse that uses expository authority to blame it on others. There is just
such a keen attention to what these "bad" others unveiled that the motor pro-
pelling this discourse to such great lengths becomes clear enough. The visual
"objectification" of body parts which are usually covered—in "our" daily life,
that is—gratifies the curiosity of the naughty little boy. It is time to bring that
naughty boy into the picture.
 L O O K I N G FOR N A U G H T Y BOYS

With a passion worth an analysis in itself, Corbey resists the t h o u g h t that the
savagery projected upon "Africa" betrays a resistance against an unconscious sav-
ageness in ourselves. His refusal to consider a psychoanalytically informed
explanation is telling. By that refusal he wards off two self-reflexive m o m e n t s
that could have given his enterprise the critical edge it needed to become epis-
temologically meaningful.
First, he denies the possibility of relating his analysis to everyday racism, a
racism that takes place now, or, for that matter, with the contemporary racism
that was constitutionally in place until recently in South Africa. The "old"
South Africa is the political emblem, everyday racism the m u n d a n e one, of the
important notion that the colonial imagination still constitutes the basis of rep-
resentations and the actions based upon them, and that continuity constitutes
the sole justification of critical analyses like these. Continuity is in this sense just
as crucial to an understanding of our culture as coevalness in the anthropo-
logical understanding of other cultures.
Second, he wards off the possibility of self-reflection about the intricate con-
nections between colonialist racism, including today's leftovers of it, and sexist
imagination and domination. In spite of his many lapses into an unproblemat-
ically male position, Alloula ends his text with an allusive evocation of a useful
insight, unfortunately not further explored:

Voyeurism turns into an obsessive neurosis. The great erotic dream, ebbing from the
210
sad faces of the wage earners in the poses, lets appear, in the flotsam perpetuated
DOUBLE EXPOSURES by the postcard, another figure: that of impotence. (122; emphasis in text)

There are just too many psycho-terms here to be true. The issue of the relation
between pornography and the (fear of) impotence deserves further examination
in this context, in connection to racism that is current such as in sex tourism to
third-world "paradises" like Bangkok. This hardly warrants the temporal dis-
tance posed by all three authors concerned. The sepia tones of the reproductions
in Corbey's and Alloula's books sustain that defensive temporal distance. Perhaps
that distance, disingeneous as it is, may be a necessary shield that allows the
awareness to occur at all.
 But there may be no need to medicalize the colonial subject, nor anyone. If
we just take the "figure" as a figure representing weakness, loss of control, the
image of "ebbing" is particularly telling. On one level it suggests that the
women in the images "hold" the dream, but on another, the dream is flowing
away from them, leaving room for the figure of powerlessness to come forward.
This seems a fit image of the gesture of exposing: the object put on display fades
away so as to make the subject of exposing visible. But then, the contemporary
critic is himself the subject and object of this change.
Again, I am not essentializing the author, but trying to tease out the traces
of the writing and quoting subject who is also the subject of pointing. In the
case of a subject of such great delicacy, finding those traces is relatively easy, and
a psychoanalytically informed discursive analysis provides the tools to do so
without going into the question of authorial intention.
And indeed, in Gilman's text, the repressed implicated subject returns in
exemplary fashion. On page 226 he quotes a passage wherein the horror of the
prostitute is represented. Her face becomes with the years "uglier than a man's,"
writes the quoted author/other. The opposite page is entirely filled with six (!)
deviant vaginas, one of which is provided with a fully-grown penis, complete
with tip, doubtless meant to denote a deformed clitoris extended by perverse
overuse. Both details in the verbal and in the visual quotations suggest a fasci-
nation of Gilman's which has more to do with himself than with women, either
black or white, but for which the denunciation of the other's racism serves lit-
erally as a pretext.
211
Are these images in fact mirrors, distorting mirrors of the kind exploited in
fairs? Then this is a locus for self-reflection. One could expect for an explicitly A POSTCARD
enlightened writer like Gilman to reflect upon the question of what exactly he FROM THE EDGE

finds frightening, dirty, repulsive in these images, and why, and what his fasci-
nation has to do with race.
Similarly, Corbey passes right by his opportunity to analyze continuity
through self-reflection. Instead, he comes up with an astonishing argument.
According to him, physical and sexual attraction has, in addition to a culturally
trained component, also a "biological, genetically determined, generally
human/male component (nature)" (23; emphasis in text). He then goes on to enu-
merate those body parts that are "objectively" exciting. If I quote this passage, it
 is with awareness that I am coming close to doing what I have been critiquing
here. But I really want to make much of the tone of the passage, which is glar-
ingly out of style:

releasing sign stimuli... certain constellations in the sense perceptions with a genet-
ically determined arousal-value—for example, buttocks, breasts, or the constella-
tion breasts-navel-pubic hair. (24; emphasized words in English in original)

More interesting than the banality of his choices is the effort to surround the
words with scientific language, whose proliferation itself connotes the reveling
enthusiasm. Of these, the word "arousal-value" is the most blatant case. The
English-Latin insertion displays knowledge, scientific seriousness, m u c h like
Freud's medical terms for his favorite body parts. "Constellation" sounds nice, too.
Failing to provide a further analysis of this "nature," which, needless to say, is
exclusively attributed to heterosexual males, and positing, on the basis of that
nature, an unproblematic sexual attraction of visual images (a cultural product
par excellence, I would think), he fails to problematize this legitimation of
pornography and heterosexism. Even if one is interested in labeling sexuality in
the most general and abstract sense as natural (although the yield of such a claim
seems nil), it remains the case that every attempt to place any particular form of
sexuality closer to "human nature" than others has invariably led to the kind of
oppressive ideologies of which these books and this exhibition provide examples.
By failing to analyze precisely that, these publications perform another instance
212 of such ideologies. They show what "show" does, but they don't analyze it.
DOUBLE EXPOSURES

PIMP VERSUS CLIENT

Alloula's is the most analytical text of these three. More than either Gilman or
Corbey, he also repeatedly states his aesthetic interest in the images, and it is not
a coincidence that his book is the most beautifully printed one. As I have sug-
gested above, the aesthetic judgments are conflated with the erotic ones, and any
hint of an explanatory m o m e n t in his analysis suffers from this conflation,
which, by analogy with the useful word whitemale, I like to call aestherotics. This
mechanism is, of course, only commonplace. While erotic and aesthetic judg-
ments are conflated in the discourse of Western connoisseurship, ethics and
aesthetics are artificially separated. Alloula condemns the ideology of the images,
but as the above quotation demonstrates, he would prefer not to have to.
Thus, each writer displays his own symptomatic: scientific discourse in
Corbey, word and image combinations in Gilman, aestherotics in Alloula. In
that symptomatic lies the writing subject in these texts. The aesthetic judg-
ments mentioned clearly point Alloula out as the subject of the expository
speech act. But in order to get a glimpse of how difficult it sometimes is to see
through the smoke screen of the "third-person narrator," confusions between
pointing subject and displayed object can be disentangled. There is an instance
of confusion which is as symptomatic as Gilman's word-image juxtaposition,
and Corbey's scientistic discourse.
Here, Alloula analyzes the motivation for the postcards with reference to the
photographer. This man fulfills a function of personified ideology comparable
to Corbey's frequent stories about Monsieur Nic.8 For Alloula, the photogra-
pher is an individual to be treated as the analysand whose desires are projected
onto the w o m e n . But this very personification conflates maker and viewer. I
have argued in the previous chapter that linear perspective appeals to the
viewer's desire to identify not with a represented body but with the represented
focalizer whose gaze embodies the mastery over that body. There I suggested
that this seduction informs the repeated conflation of viewer and "speaker."
Here, a similar motivation for this identification shows itself in spite of the
explicit move away from the position of the maker that the book proposes.
In Alloula's text the symptom of this conflation is, again, the style of the lan-
213
guage, which is incomprehensible at the very m o m e n t he attempts to be
explanatory. Here—if I may speak as an expository agent—is how Alloula A POSTCARD
describes what happens to the photographer: FROM THE EDGE

He literally decomposes (deconstructs) the very thing that propels him: his scopic
instinct which, by definition, is pure relationality by means of the gaze.
And so his voyeurism, already altered and degraded by the necessary setup he must
arrange. (68; emphasis in text)

Compared to the "I" of perspective, here the conflation is reversed: the

viewer/client, not the photographer/maker, has the better deal, and the
 maker identifies with the viewer by anticipation. Later on the same page
Alloula continues:

No doubt the author of postcards has come to terms with the fact that he has to live
his phantasm by proxy. And so he delegates to his anonymous and sizable clientele,
for whom the postcard is still reality put into images, the task of redeeming him.
Ultimately, he will have no other avenue of escape than the pleasure of the other—
a pleasure that he will have helped rouse and sustain. (68)

In this second quotation, we can see how slowly but ruthlessly the positions
become muddled. Starting, in this section of his book, from the artificiality of
many of the scenes in the postcards constructed in the studio, he arrives at the
nostalgia for lost reality, through identification with the poor, deprived photog-
rapher who knows it is all a fake and bravely "comes to terms with" this problem.
But while he comes as close to the issue as to use the word "procurer," he
never compares the photographer to a pimp. And yet that is what he is, as soon
as his status is analyzed in terms of sexual desire. As I have argued elsewhere
("Scared"), a conscious and reflective use of metaphors can be of enormous help
to understand what ordinary language can only keep in a muddled state. Just
think of what the colonial photographer does for a living. He is not, or is only
incidentally, the subject of desire but he caters to that of his clients.
And it is obvious why the author will not see that: the photographer sustains
a fiction of pleasure from which he is unable to disentangle himself. The asso-
214
ciation becomes more and more intimate, and as it moves along, the critical dis-
DOUBLE EXPOSURES tance disappears completely, as the following example shows:

This feast of the body is, first of all, a show for only one individual: the viewer-voyeur,
namely the photographer. (86)

Who is the speaker of the evaluative words "feast of the body"? This subject is
described as the focalizer of a show for one: a peepshow. But the confusion is not
only erotic, it is also epistemological. We have encountered this confusion before.
It is the attribution of discursive agency to the viewer, who is the "you," not the
"I" of the image—if not (in a Lacanian perspective) totally subjected to it. The
photographer, in contrast, is the agent, but not the addressee. He is the "I" but
not the "eye"; even he can only recycle visions built from fragments of other
visions, borrowed from the larger visual culture.
And the political content of this fantasmatic projection screen becomes more
specific, not surprisingly, in the prefinal section called "Oriental Sapphism." The
subject of the verbal discourse, here again, projects himself in the subject of the
visual discourse:

To place side by side two partially naked women, thinking that immediately the idea
of sexual perversionwill arise and that the lower depths of the libido will be stirred.
(96; my emphasis)

One may wonder who is doing the thinking here: the visual pimp or the verbal
client? Or, for that matter, the critic who is also the collector and selector, the
subject of combination and framing, in other words, the expository agent? For
it is he, the critical analyst, who superposes juxtaposition onto juxtaposition,
putting together in his album the photos that put women together.
Alloula's blindness to the functional position of the pimp in the colonial sex-
ual economy betrays a more general blindness to the ideology of class. And this,
again, could have been remedied by a clever use of metaphor as an heuristic tool.
The author does pay due attention to the exploitation of the female models as
wage winners whose labor was poorly rewarded, and whose subservient status
determined the self-humiliation imposed on them. But his aesthetic judgments
215
on the "artistic" quality of the postcards or lack thereof, demonstrate not only
an erotic collusion with the historically remote makers and consumers of the A POSTCARD
postcards, but also a class-bound contempt for the products of popular culture. FROM THE EDGE

When he writes that the photographs are failing in quality, their poverty is
not attributed to the Eurosexism, although that is the overt subject matter of
the book, but to the failure to do a good enough job:

All the "erotic" repertory of these postcards can be summed up as follows: a hasty
pose, embellished with breasts that are raised by uplifted arms.
Meaning stops dead in its tracks, mired on the surface. Commentary stumbles
against the shabbiness of such infrapornography. (98)
 While describing aestherotic poverty, the poet in Alloula provides beautiful dis-
course. I am inclined to take the word "infrapornography" seriously. Is the critic
simply disappointed by the low quality of the porn? Satisfaction with more suc-
cessful pictures, expressed elsewhere, suggests as much. This critic is a m a n of
taste, but as such he reminds me more of Sir Kenneth Clark and his refined judg-
ments on feminine beauty, than of the postcolonial critic analyzing the intricate
relationships between issues of race, gender, and class that he claims to be.
In light of these shifts, an ironic statement such as the following may entirely
lose its irony, and work against the critical project:

Most often, the breasts are the only ornament of the model. This variant does have
the advantage of putting an end to any "artistic" reverie on the part of the spec-
tator: the evidence speaks for itself. It also brings commentary to a halt. (106;
emphasis added)

What interests me here is the question of categorization, of the organization of

the show—its syntax. The critic, who is also the collector or the latter's suc-
cessor, has collected for us a selection of the finest breast pictures. These he has
divided into three categories, according to his sense of aesthetic function. And
in spite of the irony-denoting quotation marks surrounding the word "artis-
tic," he fails to mention that the semi-covered breasts might just as m u c h be
erotic teases as any of the fully naked ones; that they may be m o r e "artistic"
because more erotically effective. In other words, his erotic categories are the
216 basis of the division of the material. And within his erotic categories, "artistic"
DOUBLE EXPOSURES refers to a certain subtlety within categories of erotic attraction. What could
speak m o r e eloquently of the collusion between taxonomy and rhetoric,
between epistemology and eroticism?
In this perspective, the final words of the quote, which, in the book, are fol-
lowed by four larger-than-lifesize postcards apparently categorized among the
"beautiful," say what they do, and do what they say. They are the product of the
quintessential gesture of exposition. "The evidence speaks for itself," evidence for
what? For the perverse rhetoric of the photographer, or for the end put to artis-
tic reverie in order to begin erotic play? In any case, "It also brings commentary
to a halt." Indeed, the text is broken off, and images take over. The "evidence"
alleged by the prosecution disempowers him who called upon it; it shuts the
prosecution up. Thus, in the end, the ambiguity of the identity of the subject,
between pimp and client, is resolved in their disappearance. What remains is an
insistent visual presence of the very representations. The floor is yielded to colo-
nial photography of sexual exploitation, sanctioned this time by postmodern
critical thought. Fictional harem, de facto brothel or family home, academic
publication: we remain in the same space of exhibition.

RETURN TO SENDER

In the beginning of his book Alloula states and justifies his project thus:

A reading of the sort that I propose to undertake would be entirely superfluous if

there existed photographic traces of the gaze of the colonized upon the colonizer. In
their absence, that is, in the absence of a confrontation of opposed gazes, I attempt
here, lagging far behind History, to return this immense postcard to its sender. (5)

He specifies the conditions under which these postcards would be acceptable to

him as just one out of many views: the r e t u r n of the gaze. Implicitly, he also
therefore stipulates the conditions under which his own project could have
worked. The reproduction, even in enhanced form—enlarged, beautified, and
thematically arranged—of the images is a gesture of complicity, no matter how
critical the text that accompanies them.
Recent commentaries on this kind of publication provide evidence for my
217
hermeneutics of suspicion. W. J. T. Mitchell, an alert reader of images whose
analysis of photo essays starts from questions similar to mine, acknowledges the A POSTCARD
failure of Alloula's book to "exorcise" (307) the images of the postcards. His evi- FROM THE EDGE

dence is his own response ("feeling"; 311 n 24) to the images. Mitchell is partic-
ularly fascinated by Alloula's suggestive use of the word "impotence" as the last
word of the essay, and he relates that feeling of impotence to his "familiar lib-
eral guilt of the white male American." But in spite of that awareness, he
accepts the alleged straightforwardness of Alloula's project to "'exorcise' an ide-
ological spell that captivated mothers, wives, and sisters." He also accepts that
the "rescue of w o m e n is an overcoming of impotence; the text asserts its m a n -
hood by freeing the images from the evil eye" (310). This homosocial discourse,
 where women are exchanged between m e n in order to define and assert mas-
culinity, completely overrules the postcolonial project, the critical alibi.9
I have, in fact, suggested more than that. According to my analysis, the com-
plicity works both ways. Not only do these critics repeat the gesture of distortion
and exploitation in the reproduction of the photographs, but also the images
inform the critical text that is alleged to frame them. The stare of the critic is
caught, and he cannot help but be entangled in what he had set out to undo.
Instead of returning the gaze, the critics occasionally adopt it. From repetition to
collusion to over-ruling: the notion of illustration is decidedly deceptive.
To be sure, there must be a way to criticize the visual representations of
Western imagination that have so long oriented the vision of others and that
inform the real practices of daily life, sexuality, politics. I have insisted on the
need for self-critique. Alloula writes about traces of the representing self within
the representation. He finds those traces are lacking. True, they are extremely
rare, too rare to satisfy the condition under which such critical analyses could
be superfluous. But I am afraid he misses such traces when they are there, and
so does Corbey. Occasionally, the postcards are returned to sender, and those
moments are too precious to miss.
Alloula reproduces a picture (24) of a w o m a n with bare breasts, sitting on
this side of the grid that suggests imprisonment in the harem in so many of
these postcards. On the other side of the bars is a man; from our perspective he
is the prisoner (fig. 23). Alloula finds this image a "dramatic illustration of the
sexual connotation of confinement that is overdetermined by the phantasm of
218
the harem" (25). I can see that. But then, he writes ambiguously: "In it, the
DOUBLE EXPOSURES imprisonment of women becomes the equivalent of sexual frustration" (25; emphasis
in text). I would clarify by adding a "his" before the word sexual. As it stands,
the subject of frustration is undetermined. Although Alloula does comment in
some detail on this image, he interprets it, again, as the expression of white male
desire. The reversal of perspective, suggesting that the man is within the harem,
points, according to him, to "the imaginary resolution of the hiatus that differentiates the
inside from the outside" (26; emphasis in text).
This is an example of criticism folded back into narcissism, where self-reflec-
tion is more to the point. The "resolution" is visually implausible, as the separa-
tion between the desiring man and the desired woman remains in place. What
FIB. 23
 the intention (of the photographer? of the client? of the models?) of this reversal
is, we cannot know, and I am not sure it matters. What it can mean, for a critical
reader eager to see where systems break themselves down, is the visibility of the
man's desire and the use of his hands to get closer to fulfillment, checked by the
bars that separate. But in addition, we have here a gaze sent back to sender. The
reversal makes visible the male gaze. He looks at the woman, at her eyes. She
declines to return that gaze. The man does not look at her bare breasts, and she
does not enter into visual intercourse with him. The bars separate, ruthlessly, thus
protecting the woman, physically and visually. There may not be an explicit self-
criticism here, but a hint at how we could go about practicing such criticism our-
selves can certainly be read here. A trace, like those traces Alloula sorely misses.
As an academic trying to gain a better understanding of my object, and as a
feminist involved in cultural criticism, I cannot and will not stop at failure. I do
wish to propose a few suggestions for the provisional, time-bound game that I
am involved in playing: cultural analysis. Or rather, I want to define some fea-
tures of the subgenre publications such as these try but fail to construct: the
critical photo essay. If such a subgenre is possible, and if it is to yield new knowl-
edge, it will look like this:
First feature: the subject of exposing is the critic. This is visible in the material
presentation. This feature necessitates not only an endorsement of the problem-
atic relation between dominating text and subjected, selected images, but also an
explicit showing of how the images become a text that the exposing agent "writes."
Second feature: the expository agent provides a thoughtful display, making
220
mostly sparse use of visual material where every image is provided with an imme-
DOUBLE EXPOSURES diately accessible critique which justifies its use with specificity.10 Third feature:
such analyses constantly thematize not the represented object which is only too
easily passed off as "true," "authentic," or "erotic," but the subject looking at the
image, and what that subject is doing there. In such a perspective, each image has
its own critical viewer within it, and the expository agent draws attention to this
internal viewer. Fourth feature: a critical analysis that involves the critic makes
explicit the narrative dimension of images. Fifth feature: the subgenre exposes post-
cards returned to sender; the look of the colonized cast upon the colonizer.11
The emblematic example of what these features can help us see is the image
quoted by Corbey (160 top; fig. 23). This image alone could have sufficed for the
entire study. It would also have worked m u c h better on the book's cover than
the aestheticized, beautified picture that ornaments it, to announce visually
what the study was trying to do (fig. 23). The choice for the prettiest instead of
the ugliest image is typical. It alone is sufficient evidence of the confusions these
critics are caught in.
What makes this picture so adequate for my purpose, to propose an alter-
native treatment of Eurosexist aestherotic imagery? First, with the shadow of
the photographer inadvertently represented in the image, it is a "failed" pic-
ture. As such it is a wonderful emblem for the colonial's failure to smooth over
the contradictions in his position, and for the contemporary critic of the fail-
ure to sustain his critical view. "Failure" is inscribed in this image. Second,
therefore, it displays the traces that Alloula was craving but was unable to see
because he was unable to see himself. The colonial photographer is inscribed
within the image, not as a self-assertive narrator a la Dostoevsky, but as a fail-
ure to hide himself.
True to the notion that the essence of discourse is not in reference but in the
embodiment of the position of the "I" as substantiated by the "you," the voyeur
has betrayed himself. He is unable to sustain the anonymous, safe position, he
is drawn in and thus provided with semantic content. Voyeurism lives off of the
invisibility of the voyeur; the unwitting representation of him who must remain
out of sight is self-critical in effect. One implication of this discursive represen-
tation of the agent is a further semantic filling. The shape of his helmet demon-
strates his Europeanness; his strangeness to the place. He does not belong in this
221
world. Moreover, he is not alone: now that we see him, we see another charac-
ter coming up on the lower left edge of the picture. Thus, two m e n with hel- A POSTCARD
mets on, fully dressed, frame this young girl. Stories of a similar structure creep FROM THE EDGE

in: Susanna, framed by the two Elders in collusion.

The girl is framed, but that, at least, we can see instead of reiterating the
framing. Her skirt is lowered. Is that her usual dress, or did the photographer
request or order her to lower it, so as to show just enough to entice an erotic
response? Again, the question, instead of an answer, raises another question:
that of the subjective nature of erotic visual behavior. What do I, viewer of this
image, think of this troublesome hint at sexual abuse? How would it work for
me if I were the girl, the man, another viewer, the girl's or any girl's mother?
 A third way in which self-criticism is inscribed in this image is in the woman's
look. Contra Alloula, I suggest that here there is a gaze returned, not just a trace
of it but the full gaze, if only the viewer is willing to grant this girl the status of
subject and holder of the look. Why deny her agency as looker, or ignore it by not
paying attention to how she looks? While the exposition of her body is beyond her
control, the one thing she does control is the nature of her gaze. And that gaze
can be read in different manners. It can be read as resignation to a powerless posi-
tion, and make the viewer uncomfortable. It can be read as a cynical refusal to
smile. It may express anger or surprise, indifference, or self-consciousness. The
one thing it does not express is complicity. No money can buy her pleasure.
This absence of complicity deserves, and requires, acknowledgment. The
girl's look is not only an affirmation of her subjectivity, but also an interactive
event; she responds to the m e n in front of her. And once the viewer is involved
in interpreting her gaze as a response to the whitemale photographer, a certain
sensitivity to one's own position on hither side of the scene, on the side of the
colonial, makes one aware of the nature of the sight of which one partakes. And
that is the m o m e n t of emancipation of the "you" from the tutelage of the invis-
ible expository "I."
Looking at the postcard within the framework of a discourse of exposing
entails looking at it, not as an image of the t r u t h of "the African" or of "the
colonial" but as a (potential, ambiguous, multiple) t r u t h about the visual
exchange that informed colonialism then, and the other visual exchange, partly
similar, partly different, that informs postcolonial culture.
222
And then, the postcard as a whole harbors another feature, an image of
DOUBLE EXPOSURES strangeness within strangeness. The red stamp in the corner represents its own
fantasy of Africa. The headdress, as Corbey remarks, reminds one m o r e of
Native Americans as they have been constructed in Western imagery, than of
African dress. The image on the stamp stands in a marked contrast to the scene
on the image. For Corbey it shows how false it is. The contrast itself, the stamp
and the card as exposed together, cannot but make the viewer realize that both
images are lies. As an index of colonial imagination, the stamp warns the viewer
against a realistic reading of the image.12
Finally, according to my fourth defining feature of the subgenre, a critical
analysis that involves the critic makes explicit the narrative dimension of images.
I do not mean the narration of events within the scene, but the way the story
of reading the images happens, each of t h e m as well as the series that consti-
tutes the exposition. That way, the image loses its rigidity and fixity, the viewer
his or her safe position outside the scope of the study. Narrative comprises the
processing of a motivation. This motivation can be analyzed through the nar-
ratological question of the focalizer. This agent is the bearer of the vision
which informs and colors the image in time. My choice postcard enables such
an analysis. The inscription of the two white m e n within the image also qual-
ifies focalization in terms of space. Thus we can see the distance between the
girl and the m e n as confiningly close, whereas her h o m e , or village, recedes
in the background. She is taken out of her own space where, presumably, she
would have had the protection of her own world, and brought into the space
of the viewer.
Even static images narrate; collecting, then exposing, brings m u t e objects to
life. If the bare breasts make the postcards erotic and their light veiling "artis-
tic," this is only the case for the focalizer who, so to speak, focuses on those
breasts and ignores facial expression, or for the one who revels in pain and
repulsion. Fortunately, we cannot blame (hu)man nature for such choices, but
rather call up the stories in which they took place. Narrativizing the image-
viewer interaction makes room for differentiated viewing positions.
The general narratological question of the focalizer also has specifically visual
content. There are ways of reading in addition to the voyeuristic spectacle, the
voyeur himself in the full ridicule and risk of his position. That only a shadow
223
of him remains, in the image quoted, a shadow of which the lower part of the
body has been cut off, is a form of poetic, photographic justice. More intrigu- A POSTCARD
ing than the colonized is the colonizer; m o r e intriguing than the object of FROM THE EDGE

scholarship is its too-well-hidden subject.

NOTES

1. This is how it is formulated in the debate between traditional and "new" anthro-
pologists, for example. See Ton Lemaire, De indiaan, esp. 243—50.
2. A good example of such an analysis that escapes the kind of problems outlined in
this chapter is offered by J. Nederveen Pieterse, Wit over zwart.
3. James Agee, introduction to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (xv), quoted in Mitchell,
Picture Theory: 290.
 4. Gilman's article was considered too painful to spend words on by Houston Baker
Jr. in his response to the collection.
5. Since I make occasional use of Peirce's typology of signs, icon, index, and symbol,
I will avoid the casual—and confusing—use of the term icon for visual images as
used here by Gilman.
6. I am not trying to pin the a u t h o r d o w n for an occasional slip of the pen. Similar
cases of a mixture of aesthetic elitism and erotic judgment can be found on pp. 49,
52, 67, 68, 78, 103, 106. The choice of the image of fantastic surrealism—as Alloula
characterizes it—in the final position is also, clearly, an aesthetic-erotic gesture. It
is, I hope, clear why we choose not to include these images in Das Gesicht an der Wand.
7. "Nana, die aan haar wulpsheid moreel en fysiek ten gronde gaat" (my emphasis).
8. This personification of an ideological position is also a c o m m o n p l a c e in Western
criticism. A particularly strong example is the habit in biblical criticism to person-
ify redactors, whose identity, indeed existence, is totally u n k n o w n and only
deduced from a certain philological conviction. See my Murder and Difference.
9. The homosocial element in this discussion has been elaborated by Ernst van
Alphen in "De toegang tot de harem."
10. In this respect, Sara Graham-Brown's study Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in
Photography of the Middle East 1860—1950 demonstrates a m u c h m o r e complex attitude
than any of the studies discussed here. While Graham-Brown does reproduce quite
a n u m b e r of images, these are all provided with c o m m e n t a r y in some detail, they
are not unnecessarily embellished by sepia tones or aggrandizement, and they are
not all equally racist and sexist. The historical subject of inquiry, the anthropolo-
gists traveling to the Middle East, are also represented. The very differentiation pro-
motes a m o r e active m o d e of looking in the reader of her book.
11. It is simply not true that there exist no returned gazes, although both Alloula and
Corbey claim this; only if one fails to look hard enough does one miss them. There
224 are many, and the n u m b e r of publications of representations of the colonizer by
the colonized is increasing. In 1973 Mineke Schipper published her first book, pre-
DOUBLE EXPOSURES
senting a huge n u m b e r of African novels representing the white (post)colonizers
(Le blanc). Her recent pedagogical monograph (Homo caudatus), which was delivered
as a widely accessible public lecture, is one of a long list; her fellow Africanist
Corbey does not mention any of Schipper's many books. Views of the slaveholder
by the slave, the despot by the woman, and the white male by the African woman,
make it possible to pose as a fifth characteristic of the subgenre, or rule of the game,
the constant juxtaposition of material representing the other side/sight. Not only
"White on Black" but also "Black on White."
12. Although none of these details has escaped Corbey's attention, none of t h e m has
led him to a reflection on his own position.