Revisiting the Moroccan-American Cultural Contact Zone: Gender, Mobility, and Interracial Marriage

Abstract

This paper explores Moroccan cultural encounters with the American world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing on a range of archival materials that foreground the cultural implications of early Moroccan experiences in the United States. Particular attention is paid to narratives surrounding Moorish dancers and interracial marriages, which illuminate complex processes of cultural and racial border crossings. Examining such encounters calls for a renewed, post-Saidian approach that moves beyond rigid discursive binaries to capture the Moroccan-American intersection and its impact on cultural identities and perceptions of both the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’. The paper also demonstrates how Moroccan mobility across the Atlantic has blurred geographical as well as cultural boundaries. It brings to the fore the act of going beyond borders and shows how this movement culminated in a significant historical moment in which two cultures from distant corners of the world converged and interacted, thereby transcending Orientalist discourse and its logic of othering. More importantly, these largely forgotten narratives of Moroccan-American interaction generate a twofold counter-discourse. First, they challenge Bernard Lewis’s sweeping claim that Arab travelers allegedly lacked curiosity about Western civilization. Second, several of these accounts, particularly those centered on Moroccan women in America, subvert the long-standing Orientalist cliché of the Oriental woman as confined to the harem and incapable of transgressing her prescribed ḥudud (boundaries).