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Title Between the Colonial and the Islamic: Chromolithographic Postcards in North Africa, ca. 1890-1930
Full text https://escholarship.org/uc/item/57j387q4
Date 2021
Author(s) Hess, Ava Katarina Tabatabai
Contributor(s) Balafrej, Lamia
Abstract Postcards produced in colonial-era North Africa include the black-and-white picture postcards that reproduce Orientalist photographs but also colorful illustrated postcards printed using chromolithographic methods, which often depict narrative scenes, figures, and creatures associated with Islamic belief and history. Examples of this latter type have gone largely unmentioned in either the literature on colonial visual culture or Islamic art, but were reified by the Euro-American institutions that collected them as images belonging to 'popular' or 'folk' Islam. How might the presentation of their genesis as images made by Muslims, for Muslims, be complicated by the insignias of the European printers they bear, or by the market through which foreign tourists and collectors purchased them? This paper uses the case study of a postcard collection housed in the Newark Museum archives to argue that these prints are fundamentally hybrid and widely networked, both in the content of the images themselves and their circulation as objects. It traces various threads connecting iconographies, media, geographies, and forms of labor in an entangled world of commercial image production that crosses Europe, North Africa, and other parts of the Muslim world. These threads, in turn, reflect the power of chromolithography to move imagery from place to place and medium to medium with precision and consistency, but also a flexibility that allows for constant transformation. Crucially, we come to see how prints themselves function as active agents in an interconnected network through which so-called Islamic images are constantly being shared, co-produced, and reinvented.
Subject(s) North African studies; Islamic studies; chromolithography; images populaires; Maghrib; North Africa; postcards; printmaking
Language en
Publisher eScholarship, University of California
Type of publication etd
Format application/pdf
Rights public
Identifier qt57j387q4
Repository Berkeley - University of California
Added to C-A: 2023-07-05;10:26:53