Discursive Heterogeneity in Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham’s Travel Account Mogreb-El-Acksa: A Journey in Morocco (1898)

Abstract

Robert Bontine cunninghame graham is a less-examined British traveller who made his peregrinations into Western Barbary, or the "Land of the Furthest West," in the late nineteenth century, the era of full-blown empire. He reveals his solid support for the British Empire and its complex discursive apparatuses. Expressing his Orientalist desire to know Moroccans as Other, this traveller claims an epistemological mastery and narrative invasion over the field of his observation. However, the traveller is not a wholly root-and-branch imperialist; he is caught between narrative mastery and a fantasy of Western Barbary as a toponym, where his different desires can be validated and an image of Moroccan society as an impenetrable, concealed domain of inaccessibility and total invisibility. These paradoxical viewpoints reveal certain discursive "heterogeneities, inconsistencies and slippages" (Lowe 1991, 7) within graham's travel account Mogreb-El-Acksa: A Journey in Morocco (1898) Keywords: ambivalence; cunninghame graham; colonial discourse; oriental desire; travel narrative; discursive heterogeneity Diskurzivna heterogenost v potopisu Roberta Bontine Cunninghama grahama Mogreb-El-Acksa: A Journey to Morocco (1898)POvZEtEK Robert Bontine cunninghame graham je manj znani britanski popotnik, ki je konec devetnajstega stoletja, ko je bil imperij na višku, potoval k Berberom v »najbolj zahodno deželo«. Njegovo pisanje kaže na trdno zasidranost v britanskem imperializmu in njegovih diskurzivnih aparatih. Pri izražanju orientalistične želje po spoznavanju Maročanov kot Drugega so njegova opažanja podvržena njegovim lastnim družbeno-zgodovinskim izhodiščem. vendar pa ta popotnik ni zagrizen imperialist; ujet je med pripovedno veščostjo in fantazijo afriškega severozahoda kot toponima, kjer se preverjajo njegove različne želje, in podobo maroške družbe kot nepropustnega, skritega kraja, ki je nedostopen in popolnoma neviden. ta paradoksalna stališča razkrivajo značilne diskurzivne »heterogenosti, nedoslednosti in zdrse« (Lowe 1991, 7) v grahamovem potopisu Mogreb-El-Acksa: A Journey to Morocco (1898). Ključne