Mary B . Vogl

Picturing the Maghreb: Literature, Photography, (Re)presentation.

Among the visual media, photography is one of the most powerful means of representation because o... more Among the visual media, photography is one of the most powerful means of representation because of its immediacy and its supposed objectivity: photography has been popularly accepted as an accurate reflection of what is real. Contemporary thinkers, however, are questioning these assumptions, looking at the vocabulary of possession and aggression photographers use in "taking" a picture--"load," "aim," "shoot"--and investigating the implications of such vocabulary especially on Western notions of non-Western cultures.

Some of today's most prominent French writers, acutely aware of this crisis of representation and suspicion of the image, have used photography in their fiction to examine the problematic issues of identity, marginality, alienation, and exile in contemporary France and postcolonial North Africa. Picturing the Maghreb is a unique project that investigates how North Africans have been represented in photographs and portrayed in literary texts. Probing a variety of images--colonial and contemporary, negative and positive, demonizing and idealizing, French and North African--Mary B. Vogl displays the enormous power photography and writing have to stereotype and essentialize. In this singular and significant contribution to cultural studies, she explores the possibilities for nonexploitative cross-cultural discourse in a globalized world.

Open Correspondance. Translation of Ghita El Khayat and Abdelkébir Khatibi, Corréspondence ouverte. University of New Orleans Press.

by Mary B . Vogl and Safoi Babana-Hampton

BOOK REVIEW: Mary B. Vogl . PICTURING THE MAGHREB: LITERATURE, PHOTOGRAPHY, (RE)PRESENTATION. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003

Research in African Literatures, 2004

Imagined Museums: Art and Modernity in Postcolonial Morocco (review)

Middle East Journal, 2010

be a source of trouble for their tormentors. Hirst leaves readers with this question, in the age ... more be a source of trouble for their tormentors. Hirst leaves readers with this question, in the age of fundamentalist Islam: “[C]ould it even be said that Lebanon — the eternal victim — has now become the perpetrator too, posing no less a threat to greater states than they habitually pose to it?” (p. 4). One can only hope that all parties — Israel, Hizbullah, Iran, and Syria — will realize that the cost of a new conflict in Lebanon will be so high that incentives to avoid fighting are greater than the pressures to go to war.

Michael D. Harris. Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation. Foreword by Moyo Okediji. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. xi + 296 pp. Color and b&w illustrations. Notes. Index. $34.95. Cloth

African Studies Review, Sep 1, 2004

LITERATURE AND ARTS Michael D. Harris. Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation. Foreword... more LITERATURE AND ARTS Michael D. Harris. Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation. Foreword by Moyo Okediji. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. xi + 296 pp. Color and b&w illustrations. Notes. Index. $34.95. Cloth. In Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation, the art historian Michael D. Harris proposes to "examine how race has been codified visually and verbally, [to] discuss some of the effects of racial constructions on African Americans, and [to] look at some of the visual responses that have evolved as an effort to counter harmful racial characterizations" (2). He points out that "race is pandemic in the history, structure, institutions, assumptions, values, politics, language and thinking of the United States" (1). For the past two centuries, visual constructions of race helped determine and justify hierarchical power relations, and derogatory images and characterizations of blacks worked to legitimize practices such as slavery and segregation. Harris shows that although black has been a negative signifier in the American consciousness, African Americans have always offered "resistance to their dehumanization and caricature" (14). One of the most compelling aspects of Colored Pictures is its juxtaposition of disparaging representations with those that celebrate African Americans. In the nineteenth century, for example, the Harper's Weekly Blackville series and the Currier & Ives Darktown Comics lithographs exemplified images that demeaned African Americans. Harris contrasts these with a painting by Winslow Homer and the "counterhegemonic" work of the black artist Henry O. Tanner. In another chapter, he analyzes the ways in which the works of the contemporary artists Donaldson, Overstreet, DePillars, Lockard, B. Saar, and High respond to grotesque images of the stereo-typical character of Aunt Jemima (the "mammy"). In the fourth chapter, Harris argues that "during the nineteenth century, the black female body in art had become a signifier for sexuality" (126). Discussions of depictions of female sexuality, from Manet's famous Olympia to paintings by Titian, Ingres, Gauguin, and Picasso, set the stage for Harris's critiques of "resistant" works by the contemporary women artists Lorna Simpson and Charnelle Holloway. Harris reads "compelling issues of race, gender and class" (165) in eleven paintings by the "color conscious" portraitist Archibald J. Motley Jr. The chapter also includes a discussion of a mixed-race-conscious work by the contemporary Cuban artist Maria Magdalena Compos-Pons. Colored Pictures is as much about verbal images and language as it is about visual images. …

Christraud M. Geary. In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885–1960. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian National Museum of African Art/London: Philip Wilson, 2003. Distributed by Palgrave Macmillan. 128 pp. Photographs. References. $30.00. Paper. $44.95. Cloth

African Studies Review, Sep 1, 2004

belief that it led to a complication of identity. "Derrida's Algerian Anamnesis: or Auto... more belief that it led to a complication of identity. "Derrida's Algerian Anamnesis: or Autobiography in the Language of the Other" by Hedi AbdelJaouad exposes Derrida's problematic relationship to his Algerian past and its relationship to his literary and philosophical work, as well as how that work has been received by Maghrebian French-language writers. The last two essays in Remembering Africa, "'Immediate History': Remembering the Golden Age of Research in Political Science at the University of Kinshasa" by Laurent Monnier and "Nubile (in) Morocco" by Ronnie Scharfman, are first and foremost personal accounts about time the authors spent in Africa. They provide an appropriate coda for the book, showing how these experiences shaped the way they now remember Africa.

South of the Sahara: Selected Works of African Art

African Studies Review, Apr 1, 2005

Constantine Petridis. South of the Sahara: Selected Works of African Art. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2003. Distributed by the University of Washington Press. 128 pp. Illustrations. Map. Bibliography. $45.00. Cloth. $30.00. Paper

African Studies Review, Apr 1, 2005

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Au-delà de l'audace: L'élan joyeux de Fatima Mazmouz

Nouvelles Études Francophones, 2020

Abstract:La photographe, vidéaste et historienne d'art Fatima Mazmouz, née au Maroc et vivant... more Abstract:La photographe, vidéaste et historienne d'art Fatima Mazmouz, née au Maroc et vivant entre Paris et Casablanca, défait les clichés pour rapprocher "l'Orient" et "l'Occident," dans un but explicitement féministe. Son œuvre engagée met en avant la question de l'immigration, le statut de la femme et la problématique du corps féminin. Sa représentation visuelle des femmes maghrébines et musulmanes ose déplacer les codes et les sens, car, dit-elle, "le propre d'une culture prend un sens tout à fait différent dans une autre" (Jones). L'artiste aime explorer les différentes dimensions des significations hétérogènes, "commençant toujours par l'intime pour arriver au politique" (Nini).

South of the Sahara: selected works of African art

Choice Reviews Online, 2004

Geary Christraud M.. In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885–1960. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian National Museum of African Art/London: Philip Wilson, 2003. Distributed by Macmillan Palgrave. 128 pp. Photographs. References. $30.00. Paper. $44.95. Cloth

African Studies Review, 2004

belief that it led to a complication of identity. "Derrida's Algerian Anamnesis: or Auto... more belief that it led to a complication of identity. "Derrida's Algerian Anamnesis: or Autobiography in the Language of the Other" by Hedi AbdelJaouad exposes Derrida's problematic relationship to his Algerian past and its relationship to his literary and philosophical work, as well as how that work has been received by Maghrebian French-language writers. The last two essays in Remembering Africa, "'Immediate History': Remembering the Golden Age of Research in Political Science at the University of Kinshasa" by Laurent Monnier and "Nubile (in) Morocco" by Ronnie Scharfman, are first and foremost personal accounts about time the authors spent in Africa. They provide an appropriate coda for the book, showing how these experiences shaped the way they now remember Africa.

Art journals in Morocco: new ways of seeing and saying

The Journal of North African Studies, 2016

ABSTRACT In the last half century, Moroccan artists, historians, critics and creative writers hav... more ABSTRACT In the last half century, Moroccan artists, historians, critics and creative writers have undertaken the task of decolonising the history and criticism of their art. From the nineteenth century through independence in 1956, the story of Moroccan art was written largely from a colonialist perspective. In the 1960s and 1970s, this story was rewritten in broadly focused cultural journals such as Souffles, Intégral and Lamalif. In the subsequent decades, lesser known journals continued to reflect on the place of art and artists in Moroccan society. After the millennium, a specialised art press emerged. Current art magazines such as diptyk, launched in 2009, devote visual and verbal space to artists and critics. While a variety of media outlets, including newspaper journalism and television programming, have kept visual arts in the public eye, this essay focuses on the impact of cultural journals and magazines on the development of distinctly Moroccan ways of seeing and saying in the twenty-first century.

Le Cl�zio en noir et blanc: La Photographie dans L'Africain

La Multiplication des images en pays d’Islam: De l’estampe à la télévision (17e-21e siècle), edited by Bernard Heyberger and Silvia Naef. Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2003. 328 pages, 64 illustrations, footnotes. €40.00 (Paper) ISBN 3-89913-313-7

Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, 2005

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Algerian Painters as Pioneers of Modernism

Salami/A Companion to Modern African Art, 2013

Imagined Museums: Art and Modernity in Postcolonial Moroccoby Katarzyna Pieprzak

be a source of trouble for their tormentors. Hirst leaves readers with this question, in the age ... more be a source of trouble for their tormentors. Hirst leaves readers with this question, in the age of fundamentalist Islam: “[C]ould it even be said that Lebanon — the eternal victim — has now become the perpetrator too, posing no less a threat to greater states than they habitually pose to it?” (p. 4). One can only hope that all parties — Israel, Hizbullah, Iran, and Syria — will realize that the cost of a new conflict in Lebanon will be so high that incentives to avoid fighting are greater than the pressures to go to war.

Using the Arts to Teach Assia Djebar's" Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement

The French Review, 2003

In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885-1960 (review)

Africa Today, 2004

B O O K R E V EW S 41 tradition, Nigerian literary theater, and “special purpose performances,” t... more B O O K R E V EW S 41 tradition, Nigerian literary theater, and “special purpose performances,” the book can serve as an excellent primer on postcolonial theater in any number of sub-Saharan countries. It provides excellent preparation for a theater practitioner intending to work with theater groups in Africa, and thus should fi nd a ready readership among operatives organizing projects that use theater for social change. It can also serve as an excellent introductory text to postcolonial African literature, and could be a fi ne compendium for a course focused on the study of Nigerian literature. It is indeed important for contemporary students, readers, and performance practitioners to understand how today’s African theaters have drawn from earlier performative traditions of various types. This book elaborates upon these developments with easy elegance. Students of African theater will do well to add it to their bookshelves and their reading lists. Louise M. Bourgault Northern Michigan University

The Outsider Within and the Insider Without: Azouz Begag's Les …

African literatures at the millennium

Decadent Orientalisms: The Decay of Colonial Modernity. David Fieni (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020). Pp. 224. $110.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780823286409

International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2021

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