Colonial Gaze: Native Bodies

Abstract

Hatem N. Akil attempts in “Colonial Gaze—Native Bodies” to establish a historical framework for the question of the representation and perception of the image of the Muslim in Western culture by analyzing a state of visual divide where photographic evidence is posited against an ethnographic reality and exemplified in the nineteenth-century French postcards of nude and semi-nude Algerian Muslim women. This act of looking at an image and seeing (or embedding) the opposite of its empirical meaning has been connected to a chain of visual oppositions that place Western superiority as the primary and constantly irreverent (and inconspicuous) subject of the image. These oppositions continue to be witnessed today in the cartoons of Charlie Hebdo and the photographs of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo detainees.