| Picturing the Maghreb: Literature, Photography, Representation Contributor(s): Vogl, Mary B. (Author) |
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ISBN: 074251546X ISBN-13: 9780742515468 Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers OUR PRICE: $52.25 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: December 2002 Annotation: Picturing the Maghreb critiques photographic and verbal representations, with a focus on four of the most prominent French-language writers of recent years: Michel Tournier, J.M.G. Le Cl-zio, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Le=la Sebbar. Their activist writing reframes a picture of Maghreb produced by two centuries of Orientalist misrepresentation. The book explores photography as a metaphor for other sorts of representation and examines the cultural impact of actual photographs. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | European - French |
| Dewey: 840.935 |
| LCCN: 2002007370 |
| Series: After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial Fra |
| Physical Information: 0.53" H x 6.04" W x 8.92" (0.70 lbs) 240 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - French |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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. |