Voices from the Margins: Gendered images of ‘Otherness’ in colonial Morocco

Abstract

The main goal of this essay is to study a book- El Marroc sensual i fanatic - of travel writings written by a Catalan woman traveller, and to put it within the context of the recent scholarship that relates, on the one hand, travel narrative with Orientalism and gender and, on the other, geography and colonialism. The contradictory nature of the contents of the book leads us to challenge the notion of simple 'Othering' as presented in Said's works where the heterogeneity of colonial power is neglected in a totalising dichotomy between the colonising Self and the colonising Other. The contemporary Spanish official discourse was indeed pro-colonial and paternalistic and often drew on notions of shared history and geographical proximity in order to legitimise an 'altruistic' colonial presence. The author's position is very different from this official discourse, but is deeply ambivalent. Her ambivalence arises from her gender which allows her to live the last Spanish colonial adventure as an outsider, and al...