Reading Morocco in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press before National Geographic.

The curiosity with which 19th-century readers of British and North American magazines regarded writing about Morocco, and other North-African countries, is documented through the many articles and accompanying illustrations that were published about that part the world. Those accounts invariably portray Morocco as a contentious but at the same time desirable marginal zone where a familiar Europe confronts alterity in Africa or the Maghreb. Another, more complex matter is the extent to which the Morocco described in the textual space of magazines functioned as a viable place of transculturation, or a contact zone in which the subject asserted a degree of autonomy. The case studies used in this chapter show that such autonomy was limited, not least because the language and literary techniques used in the press repeatedly inscribed a colonialist agenda. However, the growing divergence between tourism and travel as exploration raised and left unanswered questions that held, and still hold, the potential for a better, more sophisticated form of understanding. One case study in this chapter is travel writer, novelist, poet and editor Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who complained at the beginning of his 1881 article about Morocco for the New York based Harper’s Magazine that he was “tired of African travelers. One always knows beforehand what they have in their pack." The chapter investigates how Morocco was represented to transatlantic readers in the decades leading up to the establishment of National Geographic.