Rhetorical Strategies of Alterity in Arthur Leared’s Morocco and the Moors (1876) and Budgett Meakin’s Life in Morocco (1905)

Morocco and Glimpses Beyond (1905) are two less-examined imperial travel
texts on precolonial Morocco.  ese two travelogues are British (Irish and English,
respectively) – a fact that casts on them from the beginning the special taste of this
genre which is a British specialty par excellence. Coming from the same political and
cultural backdrops, Leared and Meakin peregrinated into Morocco in a precolonial
time when it was still perceived as the “Lands of the Moors”.  ese two travellers
responded to moments of interactions with the Moors as a culturally, socially and
religiously diff erent other. Both these Victorian travellers were aware of the fact of
empire as their travelogues function as fodder to energize the discursive grandiloquence
of empire.  ey stress an ethnocentric view in depicting Moroccans and their culture,
and they communicate their observations through an interpretative framework, or
in Foucauldian terminology, through the “discourses” provided by their culture.  is
paper undertakes the examination of these two travellers’ perception of otherness; the
approach is to question and bring to the fore the rhetorical and discursive strategies
as well as modes of representation Leared and Meakin deploy in their encounters with
the Moors in Pre-Protectorate Morocco.