The Western Travel Writing in the Arab World: In – between Writing and Imaginary Representations

Abstract

This study falls within the framework of displaying a re – imagining of global literatures in general, and the travel text in particular as a matrix of visions that transcend identities, cultures, and races.

The travel text functions beyond publication and reporting limits to the imagination, poetry, stories, and other elements. By analysing Pierre Loti’s In Morocco, the main aim of this paper is to rethink Moroccan cultural history through the ‘French Other’, who draws lines between Western and Arabic societies (French / Moroccan). From the methodological perspective, through the exploration of the concepts of comparative description, cultural memory, narration of history, and cultural comparison, the cultural approach reveals how the travellers can imaginatively cross patio – temporal, cognitive, and language boundaries between French and Moroccan cultures on the one hand. On the other hand, the cultural approach seeks to disclose the European hegemony and centralism that wove a fixed image of the other / the marginalized / the subordinate…etc. This paper will be tackled from the following axes: 

1. Crossing from travelling report to transracial literary fiction.


2. Crossing between different cultures spatially, cognitively, and linguistically through the centralization perspective.