Introduction. Travel, colonialism and encounters with the Maghreb: Algeria

Introduction

the Orient […] it transposes, it turns everything on its head. (Fromentin 1999, 146)

Are the modalities and inscription of European encounters with the “otherness” of the Maghreb always subordinated to the exigencies of imperial justification? And if so then is there nothing left to say other than reiterating the complicity of travel accounts and Empire, then and now? The Maghreb is an ill-defined space on the southern shores of the Mediterranean that is sometimes seen to stretch from Mauretania to Libya but more often identified with three countries – Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia – marked by France’s incremental colonial expansion and presence in North Africa from 1830 until 1962. In the Islamic world, the Maghreb, from the Arabic المغرب العربي (or, al-Maġrib al-ʿArabī), means “the West”, the place where the sun sets. If we shift to a European perspective, the Maghreb was seen as part of the Orient, the “East”, even if much of it was to the west of Italy. Western travellers to the Maghreb came to inscribe it within an Orientalising frame that distributed power asymmetrically and justified it culturally. True, nearly all western travelogues from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries served to reinforce, or at least mirror, the broader discursive strategies of French Empire but that fact should not foreclose an examination of the detail and the possibilities of unsettling the perspective on the basis of encountering difference. What does the move from material travel to its discursive inscription tell us about the broader ideological formations that are both prior to our journey and accompany it, determining our modalities of encounter and shaping how we write it?

Military expansion

French imperial expansionism into the Maghreb began with the military seizure of the port city of El-Djazaïr (Algiers) in 1830 and the naming of the Ottoman regency administered from that city as Algeria by the mid-1830s. Thereafter, the French military moved along the western coast to Oran and the eastern coast to Constantine and from there, in the decades that followed, south into the Sahara. French occupation and advances were met with sustained military resistance led by Abdelkader (‘Abd al-Qādir) – eventually defeated in 1847 – and by a range of insurgent forces until 1870. Soldiers, French in the main, and the artists and chroniclers who accompanied the invading force, were quick to give an account of this new region seen as part of the “Orient” as well as northern Africa. Yet, within a short space of time “Algeria” was written into the French constitution (1848) as an integral part of France. Algeria – at once Orient, Africa and “France” – attracted adventurers, scholars, traders, farmers, engineers, painters, writers, tourists and travellers who in the second half of the nineteenth century “turned Algeria into their personal Orient, a land of endless exoticism which had the irreplaceable advantage of being within easy reach, (relatively) cheap […] and French” (Dunwoodie 1998, 50). Transport networks made the southern coast of the Mediterranean and its lands accessible. Jean-Claude Berchet writes that the voyage of the François I^er to Greece in the Spring of 1833 marked the tentative beginnings of (French) steam travel across the Mediterranean (1985, 5). By 1840 the travel companies Messageries françaises and Lloyds offered more regular services to the eastern Mediterranean before eventually servicing ports to the south. Within the Maghreb rail networks were constructed in Algeria between 1850 and 1878 and were linked up (in Algeria) between 1879 and 1891 (Salinas 1989, 53). It was during this period that France began to leverage the debts incurred by Morocco and Tunisia in order to have a say in the running of both countries. By the late 1880s Tunisia had become a French protectorate and, Morocco, though precariously independent until 1912 was, at that point, divided between Spain and France. Morocco and Tunisia gained independence with relatively little violence in 1956. Algeria, subjected to extensive colonisation had, by the outbreak of the Algerian war of independence (1954–1962) a European population of some 900,000 resulting in Africa’s bloodiest war of decolonisation. Given the French colonial domination of the Maghreb, the accounts of Western travellers are of interest for their complicity and, possible critique, of that process and its aftermath but also for how they frame and inscribe moments of encounter that might engender insights into that process.

Travellers to what in the early 1830s was simply referred to as French possessions in northern Africa (Blais 2014, 14) relied upon networks of knowledge circulating across military units where the officer corps was trained in military strategy, understood the science of cartography and recognised the importance of ethnography. These three elements were critical to military dominance, the understanding of space and a capacity to “know” local populations with a view to controlling or subduing them. Maps were important and early French expeditions of the 1830s and 1840s drew upon geographical accounts of those who had travelled across the region describing terrain and people. The English doctor Thomas Shaw (1694–1751) travelled through what is now Tunisia and Algeria and his account, Travels, or Observations Relating to Several Parts of Barbary and the Levant, was published in 1738 and translated into French by 1743. William Shaler, the US State Department’s Consul General to Algiers (1815–1828) wrote an account of his extensive travels across the Ottoman regency, published first in English as Sketches of Algiers, Political, Historical and Civil: Containing an Account of the Geography, Population, Government, Revenues, Commerce, Agriculture, Arts, Civil Institutions, Tribes, Manners, Languages and Recent Political History of That Country (1826) and shortly afterwards in French under the title Esquisses d’Alger (1830).

Shaw and Shaler, as travellers, can be placed in the category of the “science of adventure” that Ali Behdad identifies with the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth (2009). These savants were critical to the production of “Oriental” knowledge and their work was characterised by extended time spent in the “Orient” as well as their knowledge of Arabic and regional languages. Behdad cites this passage from Constantin-François de Volney’s Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte (1787):

Without language, we would not know how to appreciate the genius of a nation’s character. An interpreter’s translation never has the effect of a direct dialogue […]. (2009, 87)

Thus, Behdad comments that “time and knowledge of oriental languages are viewed as necessary conditions to having a meaningful encounter with the other” (2009, 87). What is a “meaningful encounter”? The scholarly and scientific approaches to non-European languages and cultures that came to the fore during this period saw less emphasis on curiosity and more on what could be usefully learnt. In an address he made to the American Philosophical Society, Shaler emphasised the strategic importance of learning the languages of the region:

I really wish that our government would determine to educate a youth here, through whom, when well instructed, and under able direction, we might take our share in the honourable task of unrolling records of time. He might, through such recommendations as the government might command, learn the rudiments of the Hebrew and Arabic in the Oriental School of Paris, and then come here and acquire a perfect familiarity with the dialects of this country. With such an instrument, if he should happen to be of the right stuff, there can be no conjecture as to what could be obtained. (1824, 14)

Shaler’s observation on the importance of learning the languages of the region makes clear the advances already made in France. For their part, the French were not only quick to translate Shaler’s work but the strategic importance of language, as Shaler noted, had been recognised in 1795 with the establishment of the Ecole spéciale des langues orientales [Special School for Oriental Languages] with Arabic (in both its classical and dialectical forms), Turkish, Crimean Tartar and Persian being among the first to be studied. Translations of the accounts written by Shaw and Shaler, as well as others, were exploited by the French military and geographers (see Blais 2014) in order to map, understand and ultimately master the region. This fluidity of roles (military, geographer, ethnographer, negotiator) characterises many of those who travelled and wrote of the Maghreb at that time.

Adrien Berbrugger (1801–1869), for example, acted as private secretary to Maréchal Clauzel at the outset of France’s military campaign in the 1830s and was sent to Abdelkader’s smala (or camp) on Clauzel’s behalf. His account – Voyage au camp d’Abd-el-Kader, à Hamzah et aux montagnes de Wannourhah (province de Constantine), en décembre 1837 et janvier 1838 – was published in 1839 and includes an appendix that contains travel accounts written by Thomas Shaw, Jean-André Peyssonnel (1694–1759) and René Louiche Desfontaines (1750–1833). Berbrugger went on to establish the Algiers Library and, later, the Algiers Museum as well as being a member of the Commission Scientifique de l’Algérie [Algerian Scientific Commission] whose task it was to describe Algeria’s culture and geography and which was modelled on Napoleon’s scientific expedition to Egypt. Today Berbrugger’s Voyage au camp d’Abd-el-Kader is catalogued in the national library of France under the rubrics “description” and “travel” and it is this relationship between travel writing, military expansion and the accumulation of cultural capital that constitutes part of that vast colonial library constituted over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that so informed the “textual attitude” (Said 1978, 92) of travellers.

The textual construction of the Orient and the Maghreb by Europeans created a horizon of expectation for later travellers to the point where the experience of travel became jaded or had to be refreshed. Behdad writes that by the mid-nineteenth century the traveller “has more of an amateur and superficial relation to the other”, and is aware of his “belatedness” – being reduced to identifying and consuming “the already defined signs of exoticism” (Behdad 2009, 91).¹ Such tokens of exoticism, along with a condensation of Orientalist and colonial discourse, were to be found in the guidebooks of the period which, as Behdad argues, offered the reader the prospect of a pleasurable encounter with an exotic that was preserved and made safely available. The “discourse of the guidebook attests to the commercial stage of Orientalist knowledge in which methods of encountering and observing the other are systematically packaged in a book to be used in the field by every traveller” (2009, 92). What we can add is the way in which the writers of guidebooks included the work of scholars. Take, for example, the extract taken from an ethnographic study by Auguste Cherbonneau that appears in Louis Piesse’s Guides-Joanne guidebook, Itinéraire de l’Algérie, de Tunis et de Tanger published in 1881. Cherbonneau (1813–1882) was a translator of Arabic texts, a founding member of the Archaeological Society of Constantine and a professor of dialectical Arabic at the École des langues orientales vivantes. Piesse includes eight pages from an “étude ethnographique” [ethnographic study] attributed to Cherbonneau and titled, by Piesse “L’esprit de la conversation chez les Musulmans de l’Afrique” [Conversational skills among the Muslims of Africa]. Conversation among Muslims is presented in this study as an exchange of proverbs, maxims and the minimum required to exercise trade and impose the dogmatism of Islam, we read. The long passage concludes that “l’esprit de la conversation s’est retiré de l’Afrique” [the spirit of conversation has left Africa]. This combination of guidebook and “knowledge” illustrates the juxtaposition of discourses that reinforced a reductive view of the indigenous peoples. Conversation has the potential for a meaningful encounter but, here at least, the possibility of exchange is foreclosed.

The kinds of travellers Behdad identified with the “science of adventure” were also present in the twentieth century. Many colonial administrators and researchers travelled to Algeria to carry out research, such as the folklorist and ethnographer, Antoine Van Gennep (1873–1957) who wrote an account of his visits to Algeria in July–August 1911 and again from April to June in 1912.² Of German and Dutch parents but raised in France, Van Gennep was interested in Egyptology, folklore and linguistics and studied at the École des Langues Orientales to learn Arabic and at the École pratique des hautes études where he studied philology and linguistics, as well as ancient Arabic. Van Gennep’s account of his visit mixes narrative and description in detailing his travels. In the main, his encounters were for the purposes of gathering information so as to better understand artisanal production (which he saw as being in decline due to imports from France). The opening chapter is “Comment on enquête” [How to undertake research] and the key to gathering information from weavers, goldsmiths and cobblers is, he writes, conversation and time. Encounters are not to be rushed. Van Gennep notes that it would often take several days of diplomatic exchanges on subjects such as Morocco, conscription, the Governor General or Paris before he would slip a question into the conversation with an air of slightly foolish naivety and take on the appearance of an ignorant, foreign onlooker so as to disguise his very real interest in the craftsman’s trade – why, he asks, have you stored all the dust of your workshop in that drawer? (1914, 8–9). This opening account sets the scene for the rest of his account which, again and again, details conversations that led him to learn more. Yes, colonial assumptions are present and there is a sense in which, traffic is only meant to go in one direction but there is an understanding of the sophistication of Algeria’s cultures and diversity and if his ruse is deceptive it is because he knows that directness might not yield as much from artisans who know colonial exploitation only too well. However, in his search for different kinds of pottery he travels to El Adjiba and meets with the local sheikh who eventually takes him to see household pottery his wife has made. Van Gennep tries to buy the items but she refuses. He recalls giving vent to his anger and insists on taking the pottery away “since I have the order of the governor and of the sub-prefect and of the administrator and of the village policeman” (1914, 96). Again, accounts of travel to the Maghreb – the acquisition of artefacts, the satisfaction of sexual desire (Gustave Flaubert, André Gide and so many others), the advancement of a career – are more often than not contingent upon colonial assumptions and the infrastructure of domination. If the physical infrastructure of empire – roads, rail networks, ports – enabled travel, it was the impact of the military officers – their physical presence and their views of Algeria – that had a more immediate effect on how travellers viewed the region, extracted value and wrote of their experience.

If we can make the claim that knowing the language of another can make an encounter “meaningful”, the European literature of the period overwhelmingly demonstrates that this meaningfulness was subordinated to the exigencies of empire and the strategic processes of containment and framing that accompanied imperial expansion. And if this is the case, then, following Burdett and Duncan, we need to ask if “to talk of travel writing as a genre is to outlaw […] unpredictable confrontations in advance and to fall into the trap of assuming that it can only reveal what we already know” (2002, 7–8). It is this question of whether or not travel writing can open up a space for a meaningful encounter within the Maghreb (specifically, Algeria) – one that somehow distances itself from the grip of colonial discourse – that partly prompts this issue of Studies in Travel Writing. If, following Behdad, we view the “belated nineteenth-century traveller [as] a consumer of sights and a passive observer of the already seen” (2009, 91) then are the accounts of what they see determined in advance by an exoticism almost always framed by an imperial project?

The link between travel and the military infrastructure of expansion is a feature of all of the articles in this issue dealing with nineteenth-century travel to Algeria and the wider Maghreb. James Hodkinson’s article examines the travel narratives of two German-speaking soldiers serving in the French Foreign Legion. Christa Jones notes that Théophile Gautier travelled with General Bugeaud’s military expedition, and that Jean Lorrain, like Pierre Loti, spent time as a Spahi officer in Algeria. What Barbara Wright’s article vividly demonstrates is how writers and painters who travelled to Algeria in the decades after 1830 were dependent on military protection and the local knowledge of officers to the point of almost becoming, she notes, “embedded artists” within the military infrastructure. Artist-writers, such as Eugène Fromentin and Gustave Guillaumet, travelled within Algeria in the company of army officers and while they were aware of the violence of imperialism – captured in Fromentin’s travel writings and, as detailed in Wright’s article, Guillaumet’s painting La Razzia dans le Djebel Nador – they rarely, if ever, portrayed the French military or European colonists (again, see Wright). And yet it is the non-seen of this military apparatus that shapes the perspectives of these, and other, European travellers – regretfully exclusively male in this issue that derives from an open call³ – to the Maghreb.

At the same time, as detailed in some of the articles that follow, writers and painters did question, if obliquely, the consequences of French colonial expansion even if this rarely challenged the underlying rationale of colonialism itself. Hodkinson’s deployment of the term “para-colonial” seeks to capture the complexity of colonial representations. For Hodkinson, the para-colonial serves to describe a space that escapes the presumed binary opposition of colonial French and indigenous “others” because his soldier-writers also identify with a Germanic perspective. It names an interstitial cultural space which, if very much European, allows for that slight gap, a stepping back, that engenders greater reflection on the nature of the European encounter with the Arabo-Berber cultures of the Maghreb. Similar spaces are also identified by Wright in her assessment of how some military officers adopted a view of Algeria influenced by radical Saint-Simonian ideas on social and economic progress.⁴ Many had a view of colonialism that looked for the integration of the indigenous peoples based on an acceptance of cultural difference. They remained, however, convinced of the colonial enterprise even if critical of the consequences resulting from a failure to integrate the cultures of the “Orient” into a vision of progress for all and the union of cultures.

Hodkinson’s analysis of Robert Jungmann’s Scenes and Sketches (1841) introduces us to a combination of text and images that portrays Jungmann’s encounter with the street life of Algiers, his scopic desire to capture the exotic scenes of the city’s everyday life. And yet, while Jungmann notes and bemoans the erasure of local customs and the despoliations of colonial modernity, it seems clear that his disagreement with French colonialism is prompted by a nostalgia generated by a disappointed taste for the exotic. Emil Bock’s Diary (1883) offers similar moments. Writing of veiled Muslim women, Bock criticises the dominating patriarchal culture yet upon seeing women without the veil in a harem, Block slips back, as Hodkinson comments, into the colonial trope of alluring Oriental women who ultimately disappoint. While the German background of Jungmann and Bock informs their views they could be read as two further examples of the European who “is a watcher, never involved, always detached” (Said 1978, 103). Their encounter with new landscapes and cultures is ocular and subordinated to scripts composed in, and for, European countries.

Bock, in particular, identified with the life of the soldier, the process of “pacification”, of warfare conducted in zones of conflict that moved into southern Algeria as the century progressed. In Bock’s Diary there is little of Pratt’s sense of a “contact zone” in which “the interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters” are to the fore. Bock’s Diary is one which Pratt would count among the “diffusionist accounts of conquest and domination” and that presents a view which understands “the relations among colonizers and colonized, or travelers and ‘travelees’ […] in terms of separateness or apartheid” (1992, 7). Hodkinson, for example, notes the “cartographical abstraction” of Bock’s description of Oran and his uncritical description of its segregated districts. Bock’s narrative offers a mapping of containment and domination that describes the consequences of Empire and underwrites it.

Containment is also a thread within Christa Jones’s article. She argues that travellers’ descriptions of human–animal encounters with other animals metaphorically capture a desire for containment and domestication. Examining a range of travelogues she makes the case that at times the “North African animal world is perceived as irritating or potentially dangerous, symbolising the possibility of a colonial rebellion” and at other times animals – such as birds common to both sides of the Mediterranean – mediate between the familiar world (“back home”) and the new world. Jones acknowledges the structuring binaries of her corpus of texts and wonders if through an analysis of how the writers draw on the metaphorical resources of animal metaphors something is unsettled through the movement of the metaphor, its displacements between images. And yet, overwhelmingly, it is clear that representations of non-human animals participate in a form of mapping, a making familiar. At its worst, it involved a process of “othering” which, Jones notes, often resulted in indigenous peoples being “systematically dehumanised and animalised”. Judith Butler asks, “What allows us to encounter one another?” and though here her question raises questions for an internationalist feminist coalition, it remains a question with a general scope. As do her answers: “We have to consider the demands of cultural translation that we assume to be part of an ethical responsibility (over and above the explicit prohibitions against thinking the Other under the sign of the ‘human’)” (2004, 49). Jones’s article returns us to that most fundamental of fictional binaries – the human being and the animal – and the uses to which it is put. European presence in the Maghreb was seen to be justified by a land and people that needed to be tamed and made productive.

But encounters with difference can have other kinds of impact. As our contributors amply demonstrate, the light of the Maghreb, the harshness of the desert, the intrigue of new cultures and fauna, the first-hand experience of a colonial project, impressed themselves upon those who encountered them. But it is rare to find narratives of travel to the Maghreb that convey a sense of destabilisation in the face of encounters with difference. Eugène Fromentin, mentioned above, journeyed extensively across Algeria and published two accounts of his travels: Un été dans le Sahara [A Summer in the Sahara] was published in 1857 (serialised in 1854) and Une année dans le Sahel [A Year in the Sahel] was published in 1859 (serialised in 1858). In both, Fromentin provides an account of what he saw and did but the latter travelogue is more reflective on how the experience marked his aesthetic practice. The landscape and light of Algeria pressed him to reconsider how to convey within art what he saw in Algeria, how to:

interest our European public in places that it knows nothing about. What’s difficult is to show places so as to make them known. (Fromentin 1999, 146)⁵

Fromentin’s concern is how to convey the unfamiliar in a form that is already familiar. Like most travellers, if more acutely, he is faced with how to translate his encounter with something new to someone not present, to the European who is happy to consume an “Orient” mediated by cultural forms. Fromentin articulates the dilemma he is facing; on the one hand for a painting to be “intelligible” and “believable” it “will have accommodated itself to the rules of artistic judgment” (1999, 146) and yet, he writes, “the Orient […] eludes the conventions [of art], it’s outside any discipline; it transposes, it turns everything on its head” (1999, 146). Fromentin, at this point, is concerned not with the leitmotivs of Oriental exoticism but with the colours of the dust, the burnt terrain and, above all, the sun: “At any given moment, this results in […] pictures which are upside down for there’s no centre, light coming from all sides, and no mobile shadows since the sky is cloudless” (1999, 147).⁶ Here we have an encounter that is not simply about the confirmation of European Orientalist stereotypes, strongly present throughout Fromentin’s writings and paintings, but a representation of an encounter that conveys a sense of perplexity, that unsettles expectations and gives rise to reflections that are in some ways epistemological. How, if at all, does what we know change when we encounter radical difference? True, we have a confirmation of difference already inscribed within a structure of power, an understanding of the exotic that sees it to be in need of translation if it is to be consumed. But it is that image of “pictures that are upside down”, so suggestive – even if rhetorical – of Fromentin’s initial bewilderment that I want to highlight while recognising that the beneficiary of the encounter is Fromentin himself whose style of Orientalism was the source of his success in France before declining in the face of new aesthetic practices as Wright’s article demonstrates.

Travel writers, like Orientalist painters, were aware of their market. To varying degrees, Western travellers produced accounts of Algeria that not only mirrored colonial perspectives but contributed to them, reinforced them by popularising such images through travelogues that were seen as a divertissement for affluent French seeking to consume, without effort, the exotic “other” encountered across the Mediterranean by the writer or painter. In such forms of representation, the local populations are viewed as a surface that forms a backdrop, they “become mute and invisible as the European welds together the ideological prejudices which will form the unshakeable basis of his presence in North Africa” (Dunwoodie 1998, 63). As Behdad notes in relation to Volney, and more generally on the encounter between traveller and “Oriental”, “the relationship is always one-way; he [the European] questions the other, yet is not interested in answering; he listens to the other, but does not offer his own tale” (Behdad 2009, 88). But do more recent travel narratives, works written in the wake of docolonisation and post-colonial critical reflection, offer a break from such one-way accounts of encounters between European travellers and the Maghreb? Are the conversations deepened, the exchanges more equal?

Post-colonial encounters

Writing on transnational, transartistic journeys in a recent issue of the Irish Journal of French Studies, Rosalind Silvester and Margaret Topping argue that “ontological crystallizations” of Self and Other – a feature of so many Western travel narratives – have come to be questioned by methodologies emerging from transcultural exchanges that result in modified identities of both elements of this binary opposition. They argue that “new cultural phenomena may be achieved, in the richest of ways, through the mixing of genres and the crossing of media” (2015, 1–2). It is a brave premise – amply supported by the articles gathered in their special issue – and invites further exploration. In this issue, Edward Still’s article examines the crossing of media and genre cross-over in the compelling work of Jacques Ferrandez. Born in Algiers in 1955, his family moved to France after the outbreak of the Algerian war of independence when he was three months old. Ferrandez is primarily known for his bande dessinée [comic-book] works, in particular his two-tome Carnets d’Orient [notebooks on the Orient] published in a first cycle of instalments across 1987–1995 and the second volume appearing between 2002 and 2009. Of interest to Still is Ferrandez’s illustrated travelogue recounting his return to Algiers in 1993 and again in 2003 and published as Retours à Alger [Return journeys to Algiers] in 2006. The texts and images of Retours à Alger describe moments of encounter productive of disillusionment and which are echoed in similar, if fictional encounters, in the Carnets d’Orient. In both genres, and through his images, Ferrandez reflects on how we travel with prior fictions – of the Orient, of colonial Algeria – that can only be disappointed. Yet, this meta-theme is not, argues Still, a site of insight into the real, as Ferrandez hopes, but suggests another level of construction that reveals the psyche’s need for ideological fantasy. Ferrandez travels back to Algiers to test his “textual attitude”, images formed through his family background and reading, multi-modal representations “another level of fantasy of ‘a multiple Mediterranean’”, a multiculturalism inflected by a particular colonial viewpoint after the fact. So, what has changed? In this instance does the combination of real travel and transmedial exploration lead to a “new cultural phenomenon” or a new insight into the well-travelled and always already read, Maghreb? Ferrandez’s work is compelling as it spurs us to think about travel to a site (Algeria from 1830 to 1962) consistently “written” by the colonial enterprise, by writers such as those examined by Wright, Jones and Hodkinson. Here the exploration is post-colonial (in the temporal sense) yet now the “textual attitude” is inflected with a colonial postmemory. Still goes further and suggests that Ferrandez’s shifts between travel account and the fictional carnets construct, on the one hand, an idealised view of the “Mediterranean” as non-hierarchical exchange transcending, and subsuming, colonial history in the Maghreb and, on the other, corroding this vision with the disillusionment of fictionalised travellers and Ferrandez’s own experience of his return journey, of sorts, to Algeria in 1993 and again in 2003. His fictional characters, including French colonists to Algeria in the nineteenth century, are disappointed by the gap between the ideal they were led to believe and the harsh realities of place. Still’s conclusion, that Ferrandez’s work is characterised by the persistence of an ideological fantasy, is convincing. It also reminds us of the persistence of “textual attitudes”, of the continuing influence of colonial literature and discourse that propagated or romanticised the colonial enterprise.

The sense that the Maghreb is a palimpsest written in Europe can also be read in the work of the Australian writer, Robert Dessaix. Elizabeth Geary Keohane’s article offers a fine reading of Dessaix’s encounter with his own sense of self through the mediation of the works of French writer André Gide and a Maghreb that is both referent and literary trope. Dessaix travelled to Algeria in the early 2000s, long after the war of independence and shortly after Algeria’s bloody civil war of the 1990s in the company of Gide’s work and its accounts of illicit sex in the Maghreb from the 1890s onwards. Geary Keohane picks up on the dialogical dimension, on Dessaix’s inscription of his journey to the Maghreb as primarily an encounter with Gide and self. She cites Dessaix: “my encounters with Gide are a prism, as all our best conversations with friends are”. Geary Keohane alerts us to Dessaix’s dissenting voice, his ambivalence in the face of Gide but, crucially, notes that in Dessaix’s account of a conversation with Yacoub, an Algerian friend of a friend who asks why he has travelled to the Maghreb, Dessaix detects a Saidean suspicion in the question. Dessaix’s response, which he shares with his readers, is that Europe has moved beyond Said’s critique of the motives prompting Westerners to travel to the Orient but that it must still work for Algerians. As subtle as Dessaix’s text is, this encounter suggests, as Geary Keohane’s analysis illuminates, that the conversation of equals across time (Gide and Dessaix) is not matched by the conversation between Dessaix – the man from “Europe” who voyages to the Global South of which the Maghreb is now a part – and Yacoub, the urbane Algerian. The asymmetrical relation of power that shaped Van Gennep’s extractive conversations that we saw earlier is replayed in Dessaix’s attitude towards Yacoub’s question. Dessaix is self-reflexive, aware of colonial history and post-colonial critique that inflect the encounter between the Global North and Global South (made especially manifest through tourism in Morocco and Tunisia) – yet, as Geary Keohane demonstrates, the work of Gide – and his sexual identity – is powerfully present as a textual filter determining how Dessaix sees, or wishes to see, the Maghreb as a place in which the pursuit of sexual desire – whether as trope or in reality – results in the silencing of the “other”. Dessaix and Ferrandez think they know best or better: Dessaix on the “orientalist” viewpoint and Ferrandez on “authenticity”. We imagine such viewpoints to be of the nineteenth century and not of the last decade. In many ways they confirm Lisle’s argument that “while contemporary travel writing claims to have moved away from the authority of Empire […] we are, in fact, witnessing the complex rearticulation of Western authority within the most liberal and cosmopolitan gestures” (2006, 261). Dessaix and Ferrandez offer complexity and nuance but in many ways their work “contributes to and encourages the prevailing discursive hegemonies at work in global politics” (Lisle 2006, 261).

Conclusion: what kinds of encounter?

Thinking of the production of signifiers such as “global woman”, Sara Ahmed asks us “to find ways of re-encountering these encounters so that they no longer hold other others in place” (2000, 17). At the risk of assertion, I want to say that hegemony is about holding “other others” in place and that travel writing depends upon such subject positions and the performance of the encounters to which they give rise. Difference – for long involving a binary opposition of unequal parties underwritten by Empire – can be made to serve the holding of other others in place. The age of Empire may have past but, like Gide’s text, continues to haunt. Chambers writes that the

colonial presence of the French in Algeria, the British in Egypt, the Italians in Libya evoked a modernity that was nationalist in form and imperialist in reach. The Mediterranean, including its other histories, languages, and horizons, continues to exist under these particular shadows. (2008, 15)

The histories of French expansion to the southern Mediterranean, the weight and influence of the assumptions that underpinned and justified efforts to appropriate, exploit and “pacify” the Maghreb is everywhere visible within the texts under consideration in this volume. So how is the difference of “other others” to be unsettled, released from the ghostly hold of Empire? It is a difficult task. As Toivanen’s article demonstrates, Alain Mabanckou’s return to his native Congo-Brazzaville – after an absence of some twenty-three years in France and in the United States of America – is marked by an unease with his association and familiarity with white culture, the material advantages that have accrued due to his position as celebrated writer and academic, and the colonial origins of the travel writing genre.

Referencing the Maghreb at the beginning of this Introduction, I included its Arabic forms المغرب العربي and al-Maġrib al-ʿArabī. This can be read as an example of typographic exoticism, the tokenism of a single word translation. But I would like to think that this is not exoticism as consumption and distraction but a spur to understand internal meanings rather external gratifications and a reminder of what is missing. The call for papers for this issue looked for articles on travellers from Egypt and other parts of the Ottoman Empire or the countries of the contemporary Maghreb writing in Arabic or, more recently in Berber, who have travelled across the Maghreb from Tunis to Fez. In Islam et voyage au moyen âge (2000), Houari Touati provides insights into the jawla, the Islamic Grand Tour, during the Middle Ages. And Roxanne Euben’s comparative study explores the ethos of Islamic travel in Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge (2006). These works, based on a knowledge of Arabic, could be read along with the case for the study of “performative encounters” made by Mireille Rosello in France and the Maghreb: Performative Encounters (2005). Along with Pratt’s reminder of travel writing’s “heterogeneity and its interactions with other kinds of expression” (1992, 11), such texts remind us of the conversations and dialogues that can occur in and across languages other than European and to attend to the complexity of such encounters. What is required is a listening that is critically aware of history as well as an alertness to Empire’s new avatars within the Global South and how they are conveyed within the detail and forms put to work in contemporary travel texts. A fresh ethics of travel writing – the case for which is so cogently made by Fowler, Forsdick and Kostova (2014) – requires an attentiveness to encounter informed by material histories and, in the case of the Maghreb, a knowledge of the languages of that region too often overwritten by European colonial fantasy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For a colonial view on exoticism and its importance to the French colonial project see Cario and Régismanset (1911). For an in-depth study of travel and exoticism in French and Francophone travel literatures see Forsdick (2005).

2 I am grateful to Professor Diarmuid O’Giolláin (University of Notre Dame) for bringing Van Gennep to my attention and providing me with an insightful contextual understanding based on his own primary work on Van Gennep.

3 On French male and female travellers to the Maghreb see Forsdick, Basu and Shilton (2006, 77–82).

4 For a comprehensive treatment of Saint-Simonian ideas on the renewal of society through industry and science in France and in Egypt and North Africa as well as the spread of his ideas through followers – such as Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin and his ideas of a union of East and West – see Abi-Mershed (2010) and Pilbeam (2015).

5 Une année dans le Sahel has been translated as Between Sea and Sahara: An Algerian Journal by Blake Robinson and published by Ohio University Press (1999).

6 For more on the relationship between travel and aesthetic in Fromentin’s work see Crowley (2011).