http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9232-8884
![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The control and representation of sexualities were powerful tools in the construction of colonial orders. Though Edward Said noted the centrality of the erotic to the devaluation and submission of the Orient as part of its feminisation, few scholars have explored the historicity of this process in particular colonial contexts. This paper reads Spanish colonialism in Northern Morocco through representations of prostitution and whoredom across the cultural production of different social actors, with particular attention to the peripheral and ephemeral Orientalisms of popular practice: postcards, journalism, massified travel writing and pulp fiction. With Spanish soldiers and male tourists expecting access to spaces of entertainment that included commercial sex, and women actively travelling from Metropolitan Spain and across North Africa to earn cash as a prostitutional proletariat, the practice of sex work was increasingly visible in Maghrebi urban space. I argue that Spanish colonialism in Morocco developed not only through official policy in dialogue with or in contrast to French administration, but through the management of subaltern Metropolitan and Maghrebi Spanish mobilities integrating the Spanish Protectorate into the broader region, in excess of the colonial state. Spanish women staffing brothels across North Africa embodied material limits to the modernist Spanish colonial project. Complicating and effacing the boundary between coloniser and colonised, they afford new light on the pacific penetration and brotherly colonialism (hermandad hispano-marroquí) core tropes of Spanish state building in Morocco, noted by historians and political scientists.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
ORCID
Camila Pastor de Maria Campos http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9232-8884
Notes
1 All translations are the author’s.
2 Official policy on commercial sexualities was constrained by internationalist demands for the abolition or regulation of prostitution glossing sex workers’ migratory practices as traffic. A thriving literature on sex work in the Mediterranean owes much to the pioneering work of Taraud Citation2003, Bernstein Citation2012 and Kozma Citation2006, Citation2017. See Biancani Citation2016, Znaien Citation2012, Pastor Citation2015, Citation2017 and the volumes edited by Magaly Rodriguez and J. Chaumont, M. Rodriguez and Taraud. Official international Conferences on the ‘traffic in women’ produced a scandal around what was termed the white slave trade as of 1902. Spain participated in such meetings, championing the regulationist stance of not criminalizing but regulating sex work, and punishing the ‘forced’ international mobility of women engaging in ‘debauchery’, see Appleton Citation1903.
3 As did Alexandria, see Halim Citation2013.
4 Arguments in this paper developed through various scholarly conversations. I thank organizers and participants at the AIMS workshop in Tangier 2016; David Stenner, Eric Calderwood, Sandra Rojo and Jordi Mas Garriga for guidance with Moroccan sources; Aude Signoles and Juliette Honvault for facilitating encounters with colleagues and staff at the IREMAM library; Leyla Dakhli and the Marc Bloch Center Middle East seminar and Jocelyn Dakhlia of the EHESS for feedback.
5 Oran had been under Spanish control until 1791 and important communities of resident Spaniards remained there through 1830 (Vilar and Vilar Citation1999, 18).
6 I thank Elena Arigita for bringing this to my attention.
7 Moro: Hurí de Granada; si fueras mora, vendería hasta mi tienda para comprarte; me abraso en tus ojos de fuego; si quieres seguirme serás mi quinta mujer; señor soy de cien camellos.
Andaluza: Quiá morito! No hizo Dios la miel cristiana para boca de moro. I thank Maria Jose Roa for clarifying the Iberic expression Quia!, used in villages and by older Spaniards especially in Andalucia, to highlight an interlocutor’s ignorance, much as que va! or anda ya!
8 The play on words makes translation difficult; soldiers are being requested not to ‘consume’ Muslim and Jewish Moroccan women.
9 Corrales Citation2002, 78. Also see Hadith Ibn Hisham by Muwaylihi.
10 As Jaafar Ben El Hajj has noted, expulsion remained ink on paper, as such subjects in Gibraltar continued to marry, divorce, spy, engage in commerce and be buried in Muslim cemeteries.
11 I thank Eric Calderwood for bringing this to my attention.
12 On Abrines, Elisa Chimenti. Petit Blancs, unpublished manuscript held at the Elisa Chimenti Archive, Tanger. Courtesy of Ahmed Benchekroun.
13 British tourists were warned that they would not be ransomed if traveling in Morocco.
14 ‘No hay aquí dinero para sostener otro espectáculo que el de los cinematógrafos con la añadidura de algunas bailarinas o cantantes de muy modesta calidad. No hay costumbre de salir de noche ni es costumbre hacerlo por la falta de alumbrado y el mal piso.’
15 ‘ … para dar como espectáculos [sic] al año; seis meses ópera u operetta= Verso y Comedia= Cine y Varietés; y otros seis meses Circo Zarzuela, Cine y Varietés. Además todo el año tendríamos abierto un salon de The y baile onesto [sic] exclusivo para familias sin tanguistas ni nada que se parezca a un Cabaret.’
16 ‘ … en mans de Espanya es molt diferent de la Argelia, alló es molt ric i ben portant, i aqui es al reves, pobre, brut y ple de espanyols pobres’.
17 Also see Christelle Taraud’s magnificent Mauresques. Femmes orientales dans la photographie coloniale 1860–1910, Albin Michel 2003, and Leila Sebbar, Christelle Taraud, Jean Michel Belorgey, Femmes d’Afrique du Nord: Cartes Postales 1885–1930, Bleu autour Citation2010.
18 France produced 60,000 images, Germany 80,000.
19 ‘Querido amigo me tienes por fin en estas tierras; de moros y moras, en las cuales no hay más que moros y militares y unas cuantas casas de meucas (prostitutas) moras, hebreas y alguna Española.’
20 ‘ … es el paraíso de la hetairas, de todas sin distinción, por viejas, macilentas, antipáticas y necias que sean … La imaginación del militar se muestra en estos climas superior a todo encomio. La frescura de la cara, la lozanía de los ojos, lo helénico de la línea, nada importa. A buen hambre no hay pan duro, dice el refrán, y como por campos de África el hambre no falta, aunque si el bocado … ’ Juarros, C. La ciudad … 255–256.
21 This was an old strategy of literary travelers to the Orient; according to Bonnier (Citation2009), Gerard de Nerval travelled to Egypt in 1943 on loans from booksellers and journal owners whom he promised the resulting travel account manuscript. The contrast is in the number of travelers and the scale of textual circulation.
22 For a different narrative in the postcolonial moment, see Choukri Citation1980.
23 ‘Fátima es una bella nativa. Esta tendida indolentemente en su tienda, sobre unos harapos sucios; ella y su madre son muy conocidas de los soldados, porque hay que evitar la muchajambre, que dicen ellas’.
24 ‘Tiró de ella la tía Antonia, una rondeña muy decidida que, desde años atrás, tenía un establecimiento de bebidas en los bajos de la casa de los Molinari, cerca de la Plaza del Progreso … La tía Antonia, tía de la madre de Mariquita, prosperó pronto.’ Alberto España, ‘Mariquita la sombrerera’ Diario España, Tánger, 20 de enero 1963.