Qayrawān
The Amuletic City
William Gallois
Qayrawān
The Amuletic City
William Gallois
“This is a remarkable piece of writing, one that breaks new ground in methods of approaching and interpreting the vast corpus of photographic imagery that has been produced by colonial occupiers of the Arab world. . . .Qayrawān: The Amuletic City shows how photo-historians can move beyond these issues to enrich our understanding of the creative, religious and cultural practices of the past.”
- Description
- Reviews
- Bio
- Table of Contents
- Sample Chapters
- Subjects
Using visual archaeological methods, William Gallois reconstructs the visual history of these works and vividly brings them back to life. He locates pictorial records of the murals from the backdrops of photographs, postcards, and other forms of European ephemera. In Qayrawān, he identifies a form of religious painting that transposed traditional aesthetic forms such as house decoration, embroidery, and tattooing—which lay exclusively within the domains of women—onto the body of a conquered city. Gallois argues that these works were created by women as a form of “emergency art,” intended to offer amuletic protection for the community, and demonstrates how they differ markedly from “classical” Islamic antecedents and modern modes of Arab cultural production in the Middle East and North Africa.
Based on extensive archival research, this study is both a record of a unique moment in the history of art and a challenge to rethink the spiritual force and agency of a group of anonymous female artists whose paintings aspired to help save the world at a time of great peril. It will be welcomed by scholars of art history, Islamic studies, Middle East studies, and the history of magic.
“This is a remarkable piece of writing, one that breaks new ground in methods of approaching and interpreting the vast corpus of photographic imagery that has been produced by colonial occupiers of the Arab world. . . .Qayrawān: The Amuletic City shows how photo-historians can move beyond these issues to enrich our understanding of the creative, religious and cultural practices of the past.”
“Gallois’s magnifying-glass-close archaeology of late nineteenth-century photographs, postcards, and related ephemera provides an ideologically engaging model for rethinking visual cultures of colonized people. Details accidentally captured in hegemonic images reveal push-back tactics and truths too long ignored. Unobtrusive graffiti on the walls of the Great Mosque and other buildings of Qayrawān (Kairouan), Tunisia, was talismanic expression by local women seeking to protect their communities from the ignominious physical and epistemic violence of racialized French pretense. Brilliant.”
William Gallois is Professor of the History of the Islamic Mediterranean World at the University of Exeter. He is the author of several books, most recently A History of Violence in the Early Algerian Colony.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Editorial Note
Introduction: A Twofold Mystery
1. The Occupation of Qayrawān
2. Visual Archaeology
3. Bab Lalla Rihana
4. The Mosque
5. Inversion, Ambience
6. You
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Download a PDF sample chapter here: Introduction
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