The Making of Morocco: The Orientalist Gaze, Representation, and Temporal Othering in Mark Twain’s Travel Account The Innocents Abroad
Abstract
Nineteenth-century travel narratives have often served as historical documents and broadly participated in the production of ‘knowledge’ or discourse and in shaping the consciousness of Western readers. Yet, the question that arises is to what extent these narratives were reliable in their representation of otherness, particularly seen in the context of the dialectical relationship between discourse and power. It is in this line of thought that this present paper sets out to explain and conduct a postcolonial reading of the textual representation of the Moors/Moroccans and their culture in Mark Twain’s travel account entitled Innocents Abroad 1869. It sets out to argue that Twain’s representation of Morocco is rooted in a broader Orientalist system of representation through processes, namely: the colonial gaze, racialization, exoticization, and temporal distancing. Drawing on Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, Mary Louise Pratt’s theorization of travel writing and the contact zone, Johannes Fabian’s concept of the ‘denial of coevalness’, and the rhetoric of colonial discourse, the article examines Twain’s representation of Moroccans as “savages,” “ignorant,” and “barbarians,”. and Tangier as radically foreign and exotic. Ultimately, the paper argues that Mark Twain’s narrative is informed by inherited Orientalist clichés, particularly those associated with the Arabian Nights, where Tangier and Moroccans are not simply portrayed but made visible through a pre-existing politics of representation.