Foreign Bodies

Building on the critical foundations established by Edward Said in Orientalism, this text examines the relationship between the Orientalist tradition in French art and literature and France s colonial history. It focuses on a central dimension of this exchange: the prevalent figure of the oriental woman, and the interplay of race and gender in both domestic and colonial history. It also offers a genealogy of contemporary French attitudes to Islamic culture, in which beliefs about sexuality and gender relations continue to occupy a privileged place. The author examines the extent to which the rhetorical status and political implications of Orientalism register the changing circumstances of French colonial activity, tracing the convergence, or divergence, of colonial practice and the literary record. She also argues against the tendency, in both historical and theoretical writing on colonialism, to divide center from margins, metropolitan from colonial. Instead, she shows how colonial products and ideas permeated the domestic culture and shaped its evolution.