Maghrebi and European Encounters Through Travel Writing: 17th-19th Centuries

Abstract:Maghrebi travel literature was overlooked until recently when it started receiving some critical attention. This paper contributes to recent work on travel writing (Gilson Miller, Matar, Idrissi Alami, Raddal) demonstrating that (a) travel writing is not a new genre of narrative in the Maghreb, and (b) alternative traditions to European travel writings should be stressed. This recent scholarship provides new frameworks for understanding how travel writing is an attempt to re/formulate identities and recover histories in the Maghreb. This paper establishes the centrality of the Maghreb as an arena for cross-cultural interaction. I shift the focal from Europe seen as the epicentre and the Maghreb as the periphery to the opposite view. While investigating the travelogues of Maghrebis sojourning in Europe and Europeans travelling in the Maghreb during the 17th-19th centuries, I am interested in exploring how the narrators represent what they see while questioning the social and historical transformations accompanying the contact with the “Other” (Christian and Muslim). I posit that the encounters that took place during this period were a reaction to acts of aggression. Drawing on the concept of contact zone (Euben), I contend that ports, oceans and battlefields were the main contact zones between Maghrebis and Europeans during this period.After a brief discussion of travel literature, I examine the relevancy of travel accounts in understanding encounters between Maghrebis and Europeans during the early modern era. In the second part, using contact zone as a frame of encounters, I illustrate the themes of captivity and war through accounts by both Maghrebis and Europeans. In the third part, I discuss how the travel acted as a transformative experience for travellers. I draw on accounts of Maghrebis whose encounters with European women were metamorphic. Conversely, I speculate that the desert acted as a transformative experience for some European travelers. In the last part, I examine how travel shaped the definition of self and other. In spite of the increasing economic and military gap between Europe and the Maghreb, and in spite of their fascination with European modernity, Maghrebi travellers developed a strong sense of identity and self through their moral and religious landmarks. The paper concludes with the growing asymmetry between the Maghreb and Europe in the 19th century and points out to some similarities and differences in Maghrebi and European travellers, whose accounts are juxtaposed, as if engaged in a discursive dialogue.