The exotic style in English travel writing and its role in shaping the historical image of Maghrebi society during the 18th and 19th centuries: A critical reading

Abstract

   This study investigates English travel writing as a historical source for understanding how stereotypical images of Maghrebi states were constructed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These two centuries were by no means uniform in character: the eighteenth century saw Maghrebi states operating beyond the reach of direct European colonial rule, yet increasingly drawn into an Orientalist framework that was still finding its footing; the nineteenth century, by contrast, witnessed a sharp escalation in European colonial rivalry, giving rise to hardened stereotypical discourses that placed themselves squarely at the service of colonial ambition. Against this backdrop, the study raises the following question: in what ways did English writers employ the mode of exoticism to generate a colonial discourse that distorted the historical identity of Maghrebi states, and embedded within European consciousness a demeaning portrait of the Maghrebi person, landscape, and past?

  The study brings together literary, sociological, and historical perspectives, approaching travel narratives not as straightforward historical records but as discursive and literary constructs shaped by the ideological and social conditions of their time. Its method is the critical reading of historical texts, with the aim of drawing out the strategies concealed beneath an outward appearance of neutrality. The primary corpus consists of accounts by English travelers including Pellow, Tully, Shaw, Hamilton, Broughton, Leared, Wingfield, and Trotter. The theoretical grounding draws on the work of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Mary Louise Pratt, and David Spurr. The study is organized around four axes: the first traces the historical emergence of exoticism and its gradual transformation from an aesthetic device into a political instrument; the second analyzes how stereotypical images were constructed in descriptions of geography, urban space, and the human figure; the third examines the ideological drift toward what might be termed "justificatory exoticism" in the nineteenth century; and the fourth reflects on the lasting consequences of this literature for the distortion of the historical memory of Maghrebi states.

   The study concludes that a substantial body of English travel writing on Maghrebi states functioned as a structural component of a politico-epistemic apparatus that lent legitimacy to colonial projects and cemented fixed stereotypes of the Maghrebi Other. Through the interlocking strategies of exoticism, Orientalism, and primitivism, these texts participated in a project of symbolic domination whose traces have not entirely disappeared from Western academic discourse. The study therefore calls for critical, emancipatory readings of this corpus — readings capable of restoring what colonial representation labored so hard to obscure.

Keywords: Travel literature — Exotic style — Colonial discourse — Maghrebi historical memory