cartespostalesantiques:cartespostalesantiques:Arab girls on French vintage postcards, early 1910&pri
cartespostalesantiques:cartespostalesantiques:Arab girls on French vintage postcards, early 1910′s There was a quite interesting discussion and some important issues raised by @houset-cell and @tragicallyphosphorescent under this post about orientalism, fetishization, exotification. I’m not going to explain the nature of my blog and why I keep posting these controversial and kinda offensive postcards, but something interesting about these cards:In the past, I had been working in the vintage postcard business (e-commerce). There were 3 major types of clientele for these so called “ethnic types” and “ethnic nudes”: - first, of course, old(?) white guys from the West, especially from the ex-colonizing countries (French bought the Maghreb, Indochinese etc, Dutch bought the Indonesian, British bought the Burmese, Egyptian and Indian cards, etc.). There were some Western women as well for the “ethnic nudes”, but mostly guys for sure.- in the second group, we had Museums, Archives, researchers, historians - no need to explain. - and the third group consisted of folks from the ex-colonies. They should have been put as “first group”, because they were the overwhelming majority of the buyers for these postcards. The overwhelming majority. My hypothesis is that they are re-claiming their past and that’s why they keep collecting these cards - like the re-claim and re-purchase of stolen artifacts, but there is a twist here, since these postcards were made by the colonizers about the colonized. This is just a simple hypothesis, it shall be verified. -- source link