From Kabylia to Marrakech: art, orientalism, and the transcolonial career of Azouaou Mammeri.

Over his lifetime (c. 1890–1954), the Algerian painter and administrator Azouaou Mammeri traced an impressive transcolonial geography that simultaneously revealed the limits and possibilities for colonised subjects to enact agency within a colonial system. Mammeri's physical and figurative movements between Algeria, Morocco, and France, between 'fine arts' and 'native arts' worlds, and between colonised subject and colonial administrator also indicated a transgression of boundaries of identity, race, and power. This was something that contemporary French colonial officials and arts critics observed and commented upon, often with deep ambivalence: how to accommodate someone like Mammeri in ways that did not fundamentally trouble or upend the rigid and hierarchical categories of the French Empire? In this article, I take Mammeri's mobility as a case study for liminal subjects who alternately challenged or were absorbed into colonial systems predicated on European supremacy, and consider the ways in which Mammeri's agency, racial positioning, and personal 'merit' shaped the dynamic of his movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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