Abstract EN:

Looking more specifically at French Orientalism, colonialism and writings on biological racism in nineteenth century pseudo-scientific discourse, right through to Tahar Ben Jelloun’s exposure and textual riposte to this racism, I hope to trace a genealogy of race awareness and racial discrimination in France and underscore the very gendered nature of racial taxonomies as they are presents in nineteenth century canonical French literature. Very often we find, as Madeleine Dobies argues, that the Orient or Other is feminized and the feminine is orientalised. For instance in Balzac’s novella, La Fille aux yeux d’or (1835) all Parisian women are figured as cloistered odalisque types, describe with the use of anthropological and botanical language which serve to other and orientalize them. Describing women as orientales makes them irredeemably other and provides a titillating gloss to the western female, boosting her sexual credentials. However this othering also reveals the condition of French women who are sexually stimulating as long as they remains indoors. Such literary representations show that the French tradition of orientalism does not always directly represent French colonial subjects or situations. Rather, the allegories about otherness in French orientalism tend to be literary figurations that detour or displace the problems of the colonial encounter; in effect colonialism is often not named or addressed. Biological difference then, particularly in the nineteenth century, serves as a cloaked analogy for racial difference.