Sufi Women's “Fantasy”, Performances and Fashion

Chapter 5 Sufi Women’s “Fantasy”, Performances and Fashion Imagination and Desire in Women’s Bodies As the anthropologist and colonial officer Alberto Pollera (1873–1939) ob- served in his time, Italians expressed “imaginary dreams … of a wonderful ambiance” when reflecting on Africans, especially when they were living in their homeland.1 These fantasies were reproduced and spread by means of private photographs and postcards that allowed African bodies and landscapes to circulate across borders. Imagination and desire, as well as invention and construction, play a pivotal role when we look at how feminine bodies are represented in colonial narratives and images. The advent of photography— which coincided with the arrival of colonialism and Italian participation in the scramble for Africa—became “a powerful medium that gave a visual form to colonial culture and helped forge a link between the empire and domes- tic imagination”.2 This new mass medium developed into a true imperial tool that permitted colonial enterprise to be fashioned for a homeland audience. The commercial photography market developed rapidly, and postcards became both a significant mass medium and collector’s items between the end of the 19th century and the First World War, and a wave of commodification, objectification, and consumption of indigenous feminine bodies in the illus- trated press accompanied colonial military campaigns. Colonial images such as those circulating through the medium of postcards helped “create and sus- tain tourist desires and fantasy”.3 Photography also participated in the cata- loguing and classification of “colonized” peoples. Commercial images created and invented human typologies for audiences in the motherland: in postcards, African faces and bodies are classified by “scene and type”. These photographs show anonymous bodies that are only rooted in colonial spaces by the caption beneath them: “Young madama in Italian East Africa”, or “Young woman in Italian Libya”, etc. Influenced by the anthropometry photography employed in 1 In Italian “sogni immaginosi … di un ambiente fantastico” (Pollera 1913: 12), cit. in Sòrgoni 2002: 75. 2 Ponzanesi 2012: 163. 3 Edwards 1996: 197. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��8 | doi ��.��63/9789004356�60_007 Sufi Women’s “Fantasy”, Performances and Fashion 89 physical anthropology, women are also catalogued according to their supposed “ethnic” identity and sex, age or status (“woman”, “young girl”, “madama”, “wife of ”, etc.).4 If we study these postcards more closely, in addition to a process of fabrication of supposed ethnic types, we see an example of the manipulation, circulation, and reproduction of images: in fact, the same model might be employed with different captions and descriptions for a different audience, and thus one single body may appear to be rooted in different colonial landscapes.5 Travel postcards gave remarkable visibility to the “exotic” and “sensual” bodies of African and Asian women. These pictures were often staged in studios or open spaces, according to the photographer’s directions, and provided a sense of a-temporality. The hypersexualization of female bodies in Italian colonial images is analogous to cases that have been analysed in other territories under colonial rule, where we find similar portraits of anonymous models whose identities and histories are completely unknown.6 While their voices may have been silenced in the colonial archives, their bodies are constantly exhibited in stereotypical representations of the black female as close to nature and out of time. These images of a sensual and sexually available “Black Venus” circulated especially, but not exclusively, among soldiers in East Africa.7 The phenom- enon became even more highly organized during Fascism, when the regime distributed photography portraying winking African women in sensual poses to soldiers leaving for the war of conquest in Ethiopia.8 One example of this type of image is a series of commercial shots portraying “Bilen” women in “East Africa”.9 Another postcard shows beautiful, bare- breasted models performing a dance that the caption identifies as a “Bilen fantasy” (Figure 13). Although their poor clothing may suggest a servile social class, the form of dance demonstrates an ambiguous role in the empowerment 4 See Palma 1999. 5 Goglia 2005. Studio portraits of women in Tunisia by the famous orientalist photogra- phers Lanhart and Landrock were used for postcards and other visual images that circulated across all North African countries even though they had all been taken in Tunisia. See Castelli, Enrico (ed.), Immagini & Colonie, Montone: Centro di documentazione del Museo Etnografico Tamburo Parlante, 1998: 139. With particular regard to these manipulations and the false nature of postcards portraying African women in the Italian colonies, see Bruzzi 2013, unpublished paper. In my analysis, I used postcards belonging to two private collec- tors: Beniamino Cadioli and Celsio Bragli. Their collections are duplicated in the newly- established photographic archive at the Casa delle Culture in Modena. 6 Taraud 2012: 11. 7 Ponzanesi 2005; Bini 2003. 8 Bini 2003: 8. Campassi and Sega 1983: 61–62. 9 Mignemi 1984: 102–109..

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