Under Moroccan Gaze: Dis/(Re)orienting Orientalism American Style in Abdellatif Akbib’s Tangier’s Eyes on America

Abstract

This article engages with travel literature and is mostly concerned with the image of America in Abdellatif Akbib’s travel-inspired narrative, Tangier’s Eyes on America (2001). It is devoted to examining a number of patterns of representation especially as they pertain to the notion of counter discourse and counter-hegemonic modalities of resistance and subversion. It also inspects the discursive mechanisms Akbib employs to represent America and highlights how Western cultural prejudices and stereotypes are destabilised, and how the discursively-inflected distortions of the Orientalist mindset are disturbed in his work. The choice of this text is determined by a strong desire to discover how the Other of the Orientalist ideology examines and understands the Western Self and modernity and how he/she dismantles “the Centre/Margin binarism of imperial discourse.”