Le regard d’une intruse dans l’univers colonial: "Les Pieds-Noirs" de Marie Cardinal

In 1988 Marie Cardinal contributed a long autobiographical text with photographs to the collective album Les Pieds-Noirs. Algérie 1920-1954. This introductory testimony gives a personal, poetic and problematic perspective to the volume. By focusing on her autobiographical experience, the author, who comes from a matriarchal family, condenses the history of four generations of Pieds-Noirs women by putting into perspective all the stereotypes and power relations at work in this private and intimate colonial sample. Two perspectives intersect in the text: that of the images, which have a testimonial role, and that of the female narrator, who questions, through her oblique gaze, the legitimacy of her presence in a country that is nonetheless her own. Marie Cardinal's photobiography, far from being a family album, thus becomes the instrument for representing the schizoid tears linked to the end of the colonial enterprise