I “inhabited” a “postcolonial subject position” redolent of “double consciousness” before knowing what any of those words meant.  In college at a time when history was the second-most popular major, and “western civ” was required, I elected to also take “eastern civ.” After graduation, I went as a Peace Corps Volunteer  to live in an Indian village and work in agricultural extension during the “Green Revolution.”

I returned to study modern European and French history, but almost immediately gravitated to colonial history and Algeria (the single most important French colony). In my first published article, which concerned a Fourierist “socialist” colony in Algeria, I was still taking baby steps away from European to colonial history– socialists could be colonialists, too.

In my dissertation, and later book, Making Algeria French: Bône, 1870-1920  (1990), I used my Third World savvy to obtain access to local Algerian archives – a first. Coming from European social history, I asked what was the historical role played by the settlers? Surprisingly, the settlers represented a lacuna in colonial historiography, even after the Algerian war 1954-1962. Yet they had played a preponderant historical role, which I determined to highlight.

Back in Berkeley after research in Algeria and France, a number of us in the Bay Area formed a study group in 1977 on colonial urbanism  (Dilip Basu, Terry Burke, Dane Kennedy, Tom Metcalf, Paul Rabinow, Richard Reed, Gwen Wright), during which time I worked out my ideas on settler colonialism and colonial urbanism.

It took my going to the “periphery” before experiencing the “metropole” to realize once back in the “center” that my appointed subject was colonialism, at a time when it was considered a historiographical ghetto and a professional dead-end.

In the 1980s I was one of the first to take historical postcards seriously. Initially, I used them as straightforward historical sources (1984, 1987, 1988, 1989). In a 1990 essay on the Annaba economy, however, I moved from using postcards as unproblematic mirrors to look through to looking at them as visual objects with their own problematic.

This led to “The Archive of Algérie Imaginaire” (1990), my most Foucauldian essay. How far can a discourse analysis of stereotypical orientalist imagery go? I asked. “Fantasia of the Photothèque” followed in 1991. Here I applied visual orientalism to all the postcards of colonial Senegal I was able to find.

In “Thinking Postcards” (2001), I limned my approach to a comprehensive analysis of postcards, writing it in outline format. It is this expansive view of postcards as objects of visual culture — from all periods and places, in all syles, formats and genres — that informs Postcards (2010), co-edited with art historian Jordana Mendelson.

I have interested myself in other forms of photography and visual culture as well.

Long bedeviled by the paucity of contextual information for popular photographs, I turned to analyzing groups, sets, and archives. Eschewing this approach in “Telling Photos” (2008), I asked instead, how far can I go in interpreting a single photo using only what I personally know about the context? For this exercise, I used a photo I had taken in India, and a photo I had seen in Algeria.

From working on historical orientalist photos, it was only a step to looking along with a contemporary French-Moroccan photographer at her self-portraits that restage orientalist studio photographs (2009, 2007).

I knew at some point that I would have to write about The Battle of Algiers (1966), arguably the best political film ever made. By the time I came to it after 9/11 (2006), it was also considered a locus classicus of terrorism in cinema. By then, the Algerian war of independence (1954-1962) had been followed by the anti-government Islamist insurgency (1991/2-early 2000s). Thus, I followed The Battle of Algiers with a discussion of Bab el-Oued City (1994) set between 1988 and 1991.

Interested in image archives, and a totalizing encyclopedic gaze, I looked into the 3,000 lithographs in the Napoleonic Description de l’Égypte (2002). In Orientalism, Said argued for an orientalist “textual attitude” and wrote about the Description but not the plates, whereas I was struck by a corresponding “visual attitude” and compared visual representations of French and Egyptians in the plates.

The only instance when I have dealt with a canonical artist is Renoir in Algeria (2003). Even then I could not help writing more about the historical and cultural contexts in which he worked than the work, stressing what had not made it into his paintings as much as what had.

It was not a big step from popular visual culture to popular literary culture. Resembling a Mediterranean-wide trickster character, Cagayous was invented in colonial Algeria and taken up by the lower class pieds-noirs, or European settlers. He largely existed under the radar of “respectable” society, yet figured prominently in what became settler colonial culture.

My interest in orientalism has resulted also in “Orientalism from Postcolonial Theory to World History” (2008). Written in collaboration with Terry Burke, this introduction to our Genealogies of Orientalism represents my most sustained engagement with Said, orientalism, and postcolonial theory.

An oft-repeated criticism of Said is that he confused orientalism, which he located in the Arab Middle East, with a broader discourse of orientalism. If orientalism is viewed instead as one among many “othering” discourses, a subtype of exoticism, then it is possible to posit a corresponding Africanism, Asianism, and Americanism, among others. This insight enabled me to identify comparable discursive practices in “’Disappearing’ Iraqis” (1992) during the 1990-1991 US-Iraqi war, and in the seemingly local controversy over the University of Illinois racist sports mascot Chief Illiniwek (2001, 2010).

I have always been interested in museums. Also, the anthropology of tourism, and the production of historical knowledge.

Long after returning from India, I had the opportunity to sit in on discussions for tourism site development and visitor’s center at Sarnath, a World Heritage site in India where the Buddha turned the wheel of the law for the first time, thereby setting Buddhism in motion (1998).

At a time when postcards were not yet regarded as legitimate objects for museum display and art historical inquiry, I proposed just such a museum exhibition. Unsurprisingly, it was rejected. I consoled myself by transforming it into an imagined exhibition, showcasing postcards of Hawai’i. I wrote  the essay as if it were a formal exhibition proposal, complete with a mock cover letter (2000).

Today, the former imperial Chinese art collections are split between the Palace Museum in Beijing, and the National Palace Museum in Taipei. The most important changes occurred between 1911 and 1949 when the formerly private and personal “imperial art collections” became the public and collective “national art collections,” which in turn were fought over by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and Mao Tse-tung’s Communists. The story of the collections lies at the intersection of art, politics, and economics (2016).

Already before 9/11, art historian David O’Brien and I had started organizing Beyond East and West: Seven Transnational Artists (2004) that featured Jananne al-Ani, Mona Hatoum, Walid Raad, and Shazia Sikander, among others. The title for my catalogue essay, “Untitled (2004),” began as if it were a mock wall label, “42 sheets, 8 ½ x 11, ink on paper,” and went on to discuss political violence and terrorism, borders and maps, gender, audience, and hybridity.

This was followed a year later by my facilitating the local showing of Walid Raad and Akram Zaatari’s traveling exhibition, “Mapping Sitting: On Portraiture and Photography,” organized by the Arab Image Foundation.

Also in 2005, I curated a small photo exhibition, “Viewing Photographs Viewing Others,” that was based on the University of Illinois collection supplemented by my personal collection.