between sea and sahara [electronic resource] an orientalist adventure

[...]... dun-colored—has been broken through in numerous spots and already is no longer able to contain it The upper city has lost its minarets and you can already make out some Europeanstyle roofs All the nations of Europe and the world come dock Between Sea and Sahara I  their warships and merchantmen below the main mosque Bordj-elFannar no longer intimidates anyone and as a sign of its tributary status flies the... ‘bizarre jouissance.’”²² Fromentin’s Between Sea and Sahara: An Algerian Journal After his second trip in  to the fledgling French colony of Algeria, the artist dedicated his life to the pursuit of depicting the “Oriental” on canvas and paper More than just representations, Fromentin’s documents, both literary and artistic, aided in cultivating an understanding of and appreciation for the new colony... travel book, Une année dans le Sahel, written in  The translator’s English title has been chosen to guide the reader, since today “Sahel,” “shore” in Arabic, means the parched territory south of the Sahara, a strip of land between the desert and savanna In Fromentin’s era, the word designated this strip as the fertile band just back from the Mediterranean and well north of the Sahara The medium... as well as much else in Between Sea and Sahara He undoubtedly synthesized material from all three trips  Philippe Jullian, Les Orientalistes(Fribourg: Office du Livre, ), ,   While antithetical to the canon of Fromentin the painter, the subject Preface xii was used by both Delacroix and Ingres (cf the Louvre’s La Grande Odalisque of ) and later, notably, by Renoir and Matisse  Preface,... French army The accounts of Bugeaud’s military campaign and the earlier pieces by Théophile Gautier honed Fromentin’s interest in North Africa Both his Algerian travelogues, Un été dans le Sahara (A summer in the Sahara) and Une année dans le Sahel (Between Sea and Sahara) , ex- Introduction xx hibit his ambition to be part of the politically expansionist climate of the times In both books, the painter... Arab world is utterly foreign and bizarre and is therefore in need of interpretation by the European In each narrative Fromentin documents this “unknown” place for those who cannot travel there He feels compelled to enlighten the public back home so that they may learn of this other world Thus Un été dans le Sahara and Une année dans le Sahel are based on exploration and explanation, with the goal of bringing... travels.”²⁴ On the heels of the military and with the words of the Orientalists’ travelogues imprinted on their minds, settlers came to Algeria Fromentin’s “littérature d’ailleurs” created a new venue for artistic expression while assuring the everlasting melding of art and politics in the interstices between seduction and conquest Between Sea and Sahara is based on memories and notes of Fromentin from three... renounced any thought of ever going back to France, preferring to wander forever in the deserts of Algeria “Vandell,” Fromentin writes, “has been everywhere where one can go as an intrepid and inoffensive traveler, he has seen everything that merits being seen.” The colonizing of Algeria thus has offered Vandell a platform on which to build an- other persona that allows him the freedom of exploration and a... claiming that an expedition to Algiers would put an end to the pirates’ reign over the Mediterranean and win back prestige for the French army, still recovering from its humiliating defeat,¹⁸ and assure France’s solid insertion into North Africa The city of Algiers was seized From  forward France conquered more territory in Algeria By , Abdel-Kader, grand leader of the Algerian resistance, was... popular body of literature and art known as “Orientalism,” which grew into an entire scholarly, academic, and artistic discipline based on the exploration of the Eastern, primarily Muslim, parts of the world “The Orient,” as Edward Said notes in Orientalism, “was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences . of Dutch and Flemish painting. Between Sea and Sahara: An Algerian Jour- nal is the first English translation of Fromentin’s travel book, Une année dans le Sahel, written in . The translator’s. Elsewhere he refers to an Arab man and his two sons as being a “living Bible.” Fromentin naturally sees Algeria as landscapes, scenes, and even tableaux vivants. And, indeed, he manages his word pictures. the Mediterranean and well north of the Sahara. The medium of the travel book offered Fromentin, author and painter, a means by which to meld the visual and the textual to form what he (and his mentor