Framing French Algeria: Colonialism, travel and the representation of landscape, 1830--1870

The nation of Algeria came about as a result of French intervention and colonization, beginning with their conquest of Algiers in 1830. In 1962, Algerian nationalists finally succeeded at claiming the country for themselves. However, for the previous 132 years, Algeria was first a colony, then a part of France. My dissertation seeks to expose the methods employed by the French to make this North African region an offshore homeland by attending to the visual representations produced in the first forty ears of colonial contact by French artists who traveled in Algeria.;I argue that it was the transformation of the territory itself that was the foundation of France's colonial project. The successive challenges that absorbed France's energies in Algeria during this period---conquest, colonization, settlement, and naturalization---were focused on a qualitative transformation of the exotic and faraway country into a distant French province. Crucial to this metamorphosis was the notion of landscape. This method of structuring heterogeneous spaces into a unified and ordered container for human activities undermined competing associations with the land and forced a shift in the activities of the inhabitants. Artistic conventions played a crucial role because they translated this foreign location into the visual terms of France. The artistic depiction of landscapes allowed French viewers to perceive the colony according to codes of composition and spatial recession, permitting the apprehension of a distant and cohesive entity, a colonial landscape. Different media accomplished this task in a variety of ways and my dissertation inquires into the distinct representational possibilities of numerous art forms. By considering painting in relation to panoramas, book illustration, travel novels, photography and maps, I interrogate France's visual culture and assess the kinds of viewers and meanings engendered by each form. The visual productions of these practitioners posit a relationship between spectator and object viewed, one that implicates both artist and viewer in the colonial enterprise by offering for consumption unprecedented access to otherwise unknown places recently seized by the French military.