My work at the Center focused on researching and writing one chapter of my current book project, “Pariahs in Paris.” The book will analyze visual culture published or distributed in the Paris region from World War I through the interwar era to study transformations and interventions in citizenship discourses, with a particular focus on North African soldiers, workers, migrants, and cultural producers.

This chapter examines the work and public personae of several Algerian artists who, during the 1920s and 1930s, exhibited in Paris and appeared in the Francophone interwar press. I interrogate how these painters and their work reimaged subjectivity, the polis, and the performative encounter between colonizer and colonized. The most prominent—Si Azouaou Mammeri (1890–1954), Omar Racim (1884–1959), and his brother Mohammed Racim (1896–1975)—exhibited in solo shows and group exhibitions with French Orientalists, and served as art teachers and administrators in the colonial infrastructure of Algeria and Morocco. During my tenure at the Center, I reviewed the primary source material I had previously collected, read the secondary literature, and assessed conceptual frameworks. In the process, I identified three broad motifs as objects of study: first, portrait photography and painted portraiture as modes of individuation challenging erasure, anonymity, and ethnographic typologies; second, landscapes and cityscapes as read from the subaltern’s position and as invested with memories contesting dominant colonial-historical narratives; and third, versions of the collective (for example, Mammeri’s Interior of a Koranic School) as interventions in the “imagined community” and public arena. Below I outline the first of these categories.

For the few interwar painters promoted in the Parisian arts press and colonial monthlies, their photographic portraits incorporated them into an iconography of prominent and respected elites. The most senior of the artists, Mammeri, appears in at least three photographic portraits published from 1921 to 1925. The Racim brothers, miniaturists whose artwork was informed by Persian and Ottoman examples, also appeared in the French and Algerian press in 1924, 1939, and 1941. Rarely credited, the photographers were most likely French settlers working for the colonial administration, which aimed to show its civilizing role and its patronage in reviving traditional arts. The photographs alternatively depict the artists as Orientalized objects, assimilated subjects (in the case of Mammeri, “the first Muslim painter”), or artisans (in the case of the Racim brothers). Yet some portraits depict the artists gazing directly into the camera, engaging with the photographer and viewer as equals. Together, the portraits offer a level of visibility that disturbed hegemonic codes, which largely effaced Algerians from the daily news, and counteracted reporting in the French metropole, which cast anonymized migrants in terms related to crime and social hygiene anxieties. The artists’ portraits can also be interpreted within assimilationist and nationalist discourses characterizing other North African elites and leaders, from Si Kaddour Ben Ghabrit, the Algerian director of the Paris mosque, who was depicted in the Parisian dailies as “the most Parisian Muslim,” to Ahmed Messali Hadj, the Algerian nationalist whose portrait in small dissident papers served as a sign of human rights leadership.

My analysis thus investigates when and how the artists’ portraits disrupt the mechanisms of colonial authority or reveal moments of uncertainty and anxiety in the colonial encounter. In other words, how might the portraits have operated as citizenship demands upon the polis or, as Simon Dell argues, as sites of struggle embedded in both colonialist and republican projects of “making men”? 

A second category of portraiture, painted portraits of historical and prominent contemporary figures, engages in reorientations of memory, history, and subjectivity. Mohammed Racim painted portraits of Algerian heroes, including Barbarossa (c. 1466–1546), a 16th-century corsair and later Ottoman admiral, and Abdelkader (1808–1883), who led a guerilla war against French colonization until 1844, when he was captured and exiled. Mammeri, too, produced several portraits of Moroccan notables and Berber caids, or hereditary chiefs, who belonged to his family. 

In analyzing these categories of motifs, I argue that Mammeri, the Racim brothers, and others generated conceptions of history, temporality, and spatiality distinct from the dominant French Orientalist mode. 

James Madison University
Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow, June–August 2025

Following her residency, Maureen G. Shanahan returned to the School of Art, Design and Art History at James Madison University as full professor.