Roger Benjamin Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880-1930 - Book Review

Mammeri and Racim began their artistic careers around World War I, so could hardly be taken to say anything of the 19th- or even early-20th-century situation. What seems more germane to present purposes is the author's desire to use these indigenous artists in a way that loads on them an additional burden--that of somehow replacing or disproving the approach of Said, as first brought into art history by Nochlin. It hardly seems coincidental that Nochlin's famed and ground-breaking essay concentrates on the two 19th-century artists we have seen deemphasized by Benjamin, Gerome and Delacroix.

This, then, would seem to be behind Benjamin's otherwise puzzling endorsement of a "part" of Said's earliest work. Said is the only theorist Benjamin refers to consistently throughout the book. Even as it makes his claim to corroborate Said problematic, or at least in need of much more explanation, this earlier essay does help to explain the seeming ambivalence toward politics that is often evident in Benjamin's book, particularly as it impinges on "canonical" figures. It must also be noted that, although Benjamin seems to treat it monolithically, Said's own work evolved considerably from his earliest conception and, in fact, for more than a decade focused on issues of indigenous agency and cultural hybridity. (12)

In all, Benjamin's work is a large, impressively detailed survey presenting a variety of topics involved in the representation of French-colonized North Africa and different ways to see them. If these perspectives do not add up to a coherent whole, it may be as much an index of the subject's complexities as of those created by the friction between the author's different, and sometimes vexed, approaches to different portions of it. Benjamin's work thus also confronts us with the many challenges involved in writing on the exotic, in seeing this portion of the past from our present location. The author is to be congratulated for digging into an innovative range of subjects, and his research will be fundamental to further understanding of the topic. Even if one can sometimes lose the forest for the trees in the current work, it details a rich and fascinating terrain and counts as a significant addition to a continuing and vital dialogue.

Notes

(1.) James Thompson. The East: Imagined, Experienced, Remembered: Orientalist Nineteenth Century Paintings, exh. cat., National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 1988; Europa und der Orient: 800-1900, exh. cat., Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, 1989; Roger Benjamin et al., Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee, exh. cat., Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1997; and Holly Edwards et al., Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America, 1870-1930, exh. cat., Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass., 2000.

(2.) See p. 92, where a similar passage occurs at the start of the treatment of Dinet.

(3.) James D. Herbert, "Passing between Art History and Postcolonial Theory," in The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects in Contemporary Perspective, ed. Mark A. Cheetham, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 213-29.