Moroccan Acrobats in Britain: Oriental Curiosity and Ethnic Exhibition

Abstract

I. Complex Beginnings: Colonial, Scientific, and Acrobatic Encounters Occidentalism and Orientalism continue to essentialize ahistorical differences between cultures, identities, histories, and civilizations, creating fixed taxonomies founded on clashing tropes and antagonistic signifiers. Both are prompted by establishment of epistemic hierarchies and fetishization of binary modes of thinking. Bernard Lewis's Muslim Discovery of Europe makes use of Manichean mode of analysis to define curiosity as an exclusive Western phenomenon. Inspired by an Occidentalist vision, Lewis assumes that Europeans demonstrate curiosity and interest toward other cultures and civilizations while Muslims show lack of interest and curiosity toward European Other. Accordingly, Lewis insists that there is a complete lack of interest and curiosity among Muslim scholars about what went on beyond Muslim frontiers in Europe. (1) It is important to note that Lewis is mainly concerned with an early modern historical context, discursive setting that he takes as pretext to make sweeping statement emphasizing Muslims' lack of interest. By creating such Manichean opposition, Lewis insists on fact that curiosity, mobility, and travel are exclusively European cultural practices. The other side of Manichean dyad is association of Oriental Other, namely Muslim, with lack of curiosity and stagnation, self-complacency, and apathy as signifiers of imagined cultural superiority. To emphasize this structural and cultural pattern, he asserts that Europe had little or nothing to offer, but rather flattered Muslim pride with spectacle of culture that was visibly and palpably inferior. (2) Edward Said's Orientalism, though inspired by vision of rereading Western humanism from perspective of Oriental Other, makes use of similar Manichean mode of analysis. Said deploys such poststructuralist concepts as Michel Foucault's discourse and Antonio Gramsci's hegemony to show way Orient has been discursively appropriated by various Western literary, cultural, and scientific forms of representation inspired by links between knowledge and power, exploration and conquest, imagination and appropriation. It is worth noting, however, that Said's critical practices in Orientalism set up binary opposition between colonizer and colonized, West and Orient, self and other. He reduces Oriental Other into silent interlocutor when he states that Oriental silence is the result of and sign of West's great strength, its will to power over Orient. (3) The underlying implications of this assumption are that Western colonizer enjoys an almost timeless position of authority, whereas native Other turns out to occupy, indeed, is reduced to position of almost total silence, entire submission, and overall subjugation. The Oriental Other in colonial forms of knowledge and hierarchy is frozen, ossified, and deleted from stage of history. By granting West total authority as subject, Said puts Oriental Other under sign of erasure and subject to elimination as an object of power and oppression. The North African context is rich with forgotten archives that can be deployed to disorient, challenge, and disrupt both Bernard Lewis's myth of Muslim lack of curiosity and Edward Said's assumption of Oriental silence. Moroccan interactions with Europe during early modern era elicit whole body of embassy travel narratives that continue to be overlooked. Ahmed Bin Kassim's Kitab Nasir al-Din ala al-Quawm al-Kafirin (1611-13), and Mohammed Bin Al Wahab A1-Ghassani's Rihlat al-Wazeer fi Iftikak al-Asir (The Journey of Minister to Ransom Captive; 1690-91) are Moroccan travel texts focusing on France, Holland, and Spain that epitomize both curiosity and agency, chronicling important moments in history of Morocco and Spain, Christian Europe, and Islamic North Africa. …