Representation Of Morocco Through Cinema
Morocco, its geographical terra firma, citizens and culture, has titillated foreigners long times ago, even before the colonial era. Many travellers, writers and anthropologists like Edith Wharton, Paul Bowles, Clifford Geertz, and others have made of Moroccan traditions and civilization the main themes of their books. Amid the western industrial uprising under the patronage of the imperial inclination, cavalcades of western writers and film makers have portrayed Morocco according to the colonialist requirements and desires of the era. The Anglo-American literary and mediatic productions as legatee to the ideology of Western colonies in general, turned their gazing gawk on another Arab space in North Africa, mainly Morocco. The original outset of the Anglo-American interest in Morocco can be traced through successive genres of travel narratives, essays, novels, etc. that seized Morocco as their subject of writing and setting of shooting films down to its strategic and intercontinental locus.
Going back to some historical reviews of the literature written about the representation of Morocco in the Anglo-American cinema and literature, we find that political, economic, and religious motivations are various pretexts that legitimize the western representation of Moroccan people together with their different cultural aspects. In Belated Travelers, Ali Bahdad has shown how westerners from the early travelers to modern tourism have defined the Arab including Moroccan people as “savages”, “child like”, “sexually thrilling”, etc. As an Arab student in the United States, A. Behdad recounts some situations that construe him as a menacing Arab:
I couldn’t but feel scapegoated by the power of representation and stereotypes that had transformed me into a metonymy of what the Middle East signifies in the imaginary of the United States; incomprehensible by terrorism and fanaticism. (Belated Travelers, xii)
From the early British literature led by Daniel Defoe’s Robinson
Going back to some historical reviews of the literature written about the representation of Morocco in the Anglo-American cinema and literature, we find that political, economic, and religious motivations are various pretexts that legitimize the western representation of Moroccan people together with their different cultural aspects. In Belated Travelers, Ali Bahdad has shown how westerners from the early travelers to modern tourism have defined the Arab including Moroccan people as “savages”, “child like”, “sexually thrilling”, etc. As an Arab student in the United States, A. Behdad recounts some situations that construe him as a menacing Arab:
I couldn’t but feel scapegoated by the power of representation and stereotypes that had transformed me into a metonymy of what the Middle East signifies in the imaginary of the United States; incomprehensible by terrorism and fanaticism. (Belated Travelers, xii)
From the early British literature led by Daniel Defoe’s Robinson