Gazing at the Subaltern: Images of the Tunisian Jewess in Texts and Photographs at the Fin de Siècle

This research stands at the intersections of history, visual anthropology, and postcolonial studies. (Here, "postcolonial" refers to the initial period  of colonization, independence, and the post-independence era of our own day.) In this study, representations of the subaltern focus on the Tunisian Jewess in the early colonial period of French rule in Tunisia, 1881-1914. Texts and photographs from the Tunisia archives of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) educational network, headquartered in Paris, indicate that in addition to the "gaze" of the European photographer, the gaze of the "indigenous" male photographer was also directed at girls and women of his own community. However, as one scholar remarks, "Not a few ethnographic photographs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries [from the Middle East and North Africa] are staged images, catering to European romantic notions and taste for exotica." While individual Jewish women in Tunisia at the fin de siècle could be viewed as romantic, exotic, or "indecent" ( in the eyes of at least one male European traveler), family portraits and school photographs of the era defy these categorizations. Rather, in the latter two cases,  they  portray females as agents or symbols of social change, particularly in regard to dress. Moreover, texts, in the form of correspondence from schoolteachers, disclose the reasons why Jewish female attire appeared indecent to Europeans and how Jewish females functioned as agents for social change within the family and the community. This presentation will contribute to the postcolonial views of a colonial situation, more usually applied to literary than historical studies. Moreover, the texts and photographs reveal a complex and multi-layered society, conveyed by the gaze of the photographer, as we, as onlookers, similarly gaze at the subaltern.