Intercultural Encounters in Colonial North Africa: the Unmorphed Imagery of Colonial Cinema, the Narratives of Legitimatization, and the Inchoate Politics of Broken Subjectivities

Abstract

The representational politics of European colonial cinema was effectively decisive in shaping the values and ideologies of the articulated discourse of colonialism in representing cultural encounters and racial differences. This article attempts to analyse and explore how the colonial cinema of the early twentieth century produced a biased politics of representation and persistent modes of constructing North Africans within the confines of an orientalising colonial imaginary that turns cultural encounters into a display of power and superiority. It addresses the ways cinematic representation of North Africans accentuates the homogenising discourse of domination, the legitimization of conquest and the articulation of intercultural encounters on a stereotypical and judgmental basis. While a part of this cinema kept (re)visiting the same classical tropes of exoticism and racial inferiority of the native cultures, favouring the stereotypical portrayals and racial prejudices of “others” that blatantly rest on the “us and them” dichotomy, the other part tried to introduce a sort of paradigm shift that complicates the unquestionable presence of colons in North Africa and interrogates the parameters of their colonial identity. This article argues that colonial cinema of the 1930S has introduced a range of Western protagonists and colons with complex forms of identifications, questionable moral consciousness, and conflicted colonial subjectivities.