The Landscape to the South: Eugène Fromentin and the Postcolonial Nineteenth Century

Postcolonial critics and novelists have brought a new readership to the travel writer and exotic-landscape painter Eugène Fromentin. In turn, the Algerian narratives of this particularly articulate and artistic traveller help us to uncover a postcolonial nineteenth century. A postcolonial study of how history and travel description are linked in Fromentin’s treatment of landscape shows us that histories still matter, and that postcolonial theory needs the scholarly construct of a francophone nineteenth century in order to think about them. While Fromentin’s paintings present a timeless, immobile Orient, his prose writing ostensibly rejects a historical approach but, through mute traces marking the landscape, reinstates Algeria in the context of the recent, and bloody, colonial past. This article argues that, rather than simply perpetuating Orientalism, Fromentin’s travel writing is a form of postcolonial history.