[7][8] Having graduated from the École Normale Supérieure, he further studied literature at the University of Algiers and La Sorbonne, Paris, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on Denis Diderot, a French philosopher and writer.

[1][12][9] Having become an editor in Paris in 1967, he continued writing poetry, essays on poetics, and philosophy, working in the French language.

The book provides commentary on the images, especially those depicting eroticized "scenes of Algerian women" during the French colonial regime.

He declares that, "Wanting to possess the Algerian land, French colonists first claimed the bodies of its women, using sex as a surrogate for an extension of another larger usurpation of culture."

Alloula's book claims that these photographs were circulated as evidence of the exotic, backward, and strange customs of Algerians.