Mediated Bodies: The Production of the Colonized Francophone Subject

The French Third Republic (1870-1940) coincided with the invention not only of cinema but also of many other technologies—including Étienne-Jules Marey's chronophotography of bodies in motion, the microphonographe (a precursor to the hearing aid), and the ergograph (which measured muscle fatigue)—which in turn were yoked to the state and to the imperial project of examining, classifying, and representing different kinds of human bodies. Through the use of these technologies, the body of "natural man," the colonized subject under French colonial rule, was set in opposition to the French (male) body. The various recordings and measurements taken of the colonized body, according to Peter Bloom's French Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism, helped to justify French colonization as part of a humanitarian, civilizing mission, a mission that Bloom suggests is perpetuated even now in images that seek to justify Western humanitarian intervention in developing nations. In preparing this book, Bloom conducted extensive archival research, and he puts a vast array of diverse objects—from postcards, advertisements, and films, to scientific inventions and schools of philosophy—in dialogue with one another in order to theorize the way in which French colonial documentaries created an image of the French empire as a unified space and an image of the colonized subject as requiring colonial aid. While there are places in which the connections between some of these objects could be more clearly drawn—for instance, in his discussion of the link between the Jungian "imago," wartime shell shock, and the colonial subject—Bloom directs our attention to the important role played by industrial, medical, and educational films in terms of their function within and their reflection of the French colonial project.

During the late nineteenth century, the idea of "natural man," which was generally associated with the colonized subject, gave rise to comparative studies of different "types" of bodies and also led to particular conceptions of the human body itself. Philosophers, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Sensationalists, and the Ideologues, theorized "natural man" at a time when various technologies that extended human perceptions encouraged an understanding of the human body as a machine. Moreover, these ideas about "natural man" and such prosthetic technologies came about within the context of a French nation in need of national rejuvenation after France's humiliating loss in the Franco-Prussian War. Much of this rejuvenation was centered on the physical body. In fact, Bloom reveals, in France before the era of the Third Republic, one assumed that physical conditioning was based on geographical milieu, not on physical training. However, as physiological studies were applied to military training, the idea of physical education emerged, allowing French men to increase and prove their virility through exercise and physical feats. Not surprisingly, technologies of indexical representation were quickly engaged in the study of human strength and motion. And indeed, Marey's collaborator, Georges Demeny, ran the Circle for Rational Gymnastics before turning toward technologies of representation, which underscores the close link between the development of cinematic devices and the study of human physiology. And, of course, the bodies of colonized subjects were consistently placed—through the sciences of phrenology, anthropocentric measurement, and craniometry—within hierarchies of bodies that put them at the bottom. This hierarchy was intimately tied to the camera. In contrast to "natural man," who was equated with a premodern past, the camera represented modernity. Bloom shows how these various technologies of bodily measurement reinforced the notion that the French colonizers were needed to civilize and "save" these colonized bodies.

One such body was that of the Senegalese sharpshooter. Re-examining the image of the Senegalese sharpshooter that Roland Barthes identified as a mythic figure embodying and naturalizing the "split subjectivity" of the colonized subject who is also simultaneously an obedient French soldier, Bloom argues that the figure of the sharpshooter served as an image of both the assimilation of the African subject into French civilization and the threat of miscegenation...