Eleanor Elsner’s Discordant Discourse and Split Subjectivity in The Magic of Morocco (1928)

On board the Macoris, the British woman traveller Eleanor Elsner peregrinated into French Morocco, landing in Casablanca in 1928. Elsner’s The Magic of Morocco is about the author’s search for the atavistic at a time when the European colonial power structure and the rise of tourism had transformed the exotic referent into the familiar sign of Western hegemony. Elsner could not help but experience a sense of displacement in time and space, an experience that produced either a sense of disorientation and loss, or an obsessive urge to discover the “authentic” Other. Elsner’s account is imbued with discursive ambivalences and ideological uncertainties. Her discourse is complicitous as she vociferously lauds the French colonial enterprise in the person of General Lyautey, the engineer of the “peaceful pacification.” The present paper focuses on Elsner and her account as a staunch advocate of the French colonial enterprise in Morocco and her quest for elsewhere. This paper explores Elsner’s discordant practices and discourses as a split subject/traveller in Protectorate Morocco.