Travel narratives about Morocco constitute an inextricable part of the discursive practices that created and maintained an ontological and epistemological construction of Morocco that made it fit in the homogenous and monolithic Orient. Therefore, one way of proving such a claim is by questioning the image of Morocco and the way the country has been identified from a Western perspective based on a body of produced knowledge, particularly travel narratives, and thus the subject of this essay. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ colonial waves intensified the interaction and encounters between Europe and its subject colonies. This had several consequences among which the production of an unprecedented amount of literature,
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This strategy took a paradigm shift “during the period of extraordinary European ascendancy from the late Renaissance” due to the remarkable development of different scientific disciplines such as, “ethnology, comparative anatomy, philology, and history” , by means of which Westerners varnished their subjectivities with a veneer of pseudo sciences. The following passage is from a travel narrative published in 1897 titled Morocco: Its People and Places by the Italian writer Edmundo De Amicis, which provides an example of how Orientalism is shot through with ethnocentric and racist tendencies by dint of which Orientalists got involved in a process of Othering that “put the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships” with Orientals, i.e. the subject and object, the Superior and the inferior, the civilized and the uncivilized, …show more content…
That is, by representing Orientals as savage and barbaric in need for civilization; fanatics and despots in need for a better governance and law; superstitious and primitive in need for rationality and science, all of which Europeans can bring to the Orient for their being all what the Orientals are not. More, such imperial and ideological functions Orientalism as a discursive practice serves, as is the case in both examples provided above, Stutfield’s and De Amicis’ narratives, draw our attention to how “European awareness of the Orient, transformed itself from being textual and contemplative into being administrative, economic and even military” ; a transformation that may be considered as a dividing line between the European age of discovery and colonization as well as between classical Orientalism and ‘modern Orientalism’, as referred to by Said . In sum, the selected examples provided above from travel narratives on Morocco highlights some of the main characteristics and facets of Orientalist discourse as criticized by Edward said in his magnum opus, Orientalism, and illustrates how the way the west came into terms with Morocco was based on the Orient's special place in European Western
This strategy took a paradigm shift “during the period of extraordinary European ascendancy from the late Renaissance” due to the remarkable development of different scientific disciplines such as, “ethnology, comparative anatomy, philology, and history” , by means of which Westerners varnished their subjectivities with a veneer of pseudo sciences. The following passage is from a travel narrative published in 1897 titled Morocco: Its People and Places by the Italian writer Edmundo De Amicis, which provides an example of how Orientalism is shot through with ethnocentric and racist tendencies by dint of which Orientalists got involved in a process of Othering that “put the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships” with Orientals, i.e. the subject and object, the Superior and the inferior, the civilized and the uncivilized, …show more content…
That is, by representing Orientals as savage and barbaric in need for civilization; fanatics and despots in need for a better governance and law; superstitious and primitive in need for rationality and science, all of which Europeans can bring to the Orient for their being all what the Orientals are not. More, such imperial and ideological functions Orientalism as a discursive practice serves, as is the case in both examples provided above, Stutfield’s and De Amicis’ narratives, draw our attention to how “European awareness of the Orient, transformed itself from being textual and contemplative into being administrative, economic and even military” ; a transformation that may be considered as a dividing line between the European age of discovery and colonization as well as between classical Orientalism and ‘modern Orientalism’, as referred to by Said . In sum, the selected examples provided above from travel narratives on Morocco highlights some of the main characteristics and facets of Orientalist discourse as criticized by Edward said in his magnum opus, Orientalism, and illustrates how the way the west came into terms with Morocco was based on the Orient's special place in European Western