On the Racialization of the Moroccan ‘Other’ in Orientalist Romance

This paper offers an understanding of the discourse of difference in relation to the themes of race and identity in Rebecca Stratton’s bestselling romance The Silken Cage. It unravels how Morocco, as a subject and a culture, is racialized in British orientalist romance so as to underpin the discourse of the centre/periphery duality in cross-cultural encounters. The Silken Cage is worthy of study due to its interest in how the Moroccan ‘Other’ is turned into a commodity in popular romance. After a postcolonial analysis of the suggested romance, it was found that racial conceptions of the Moroccan Other’s identity are at large contingent on racial hierarchies. The novel seems, at first glance, to negotiate the construction of racial identities and thereby dismantle the system of binarism between the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other.’ However, the author’s emphasis on the ambivalence of the oriental subjects articulates a continued need for racial sameness and the denial of difference. Needless to say, given that racial hybridity is a prerequisite for the courtship to be successful reveals that Stratton resists cross-cultural differences. It can be thus argued that Stratton’s romance is an interracial ground where racial differences are not welcomed to legitimize Western hegemony and domination over the Orient.

question this 'Eurocentric' mode of thinking.It is within this cultural and historical context that this paper undertakes to investigate how racial identities are represented in Rebecca Stratton's orientalist romance The Silken Cage.It seeks to unravel how such representation is based on racial differentiations to sustain the discourse of centre/periphery duality in crosscultural encounters.
Early studies of colonial discourse did not give much attention to Western female writers' works due to their triviality and unauthenticity, thereby being totally excluded from the so-called 'literary canon' until the 1950s, especially with the emergence of cultural studies in Britain.However, to fully understand the subtleties and complexities of the imperial project, it is of extreme cruciality to lay bare how Western women writers have participated in this project.The most recent studies available on, or related to, racial representations of Morocco include: Mourad, 2016;Aammari, 2017;Khouf and Hayet, 2018;Benhima & Mohammed, 2019;Wade-Lang, 2019;El Filali, 2020;Saissi, 2021;Oumoussa, 2021;and Saissi, 2022.Given the review of literature, it is very primordial to note that much research has been carried out on racial representations of Morocco in imperial travel literature, but there is, in the meantime, no critical scholarly interest in how it is racially represented in orientalist romance.This paper is then an attempt to fill this research gap.It argues that although romance fiction is believed to be a subgenre within the 'literary canon' and an aspect of 'lowbrow' literature, it is replete with racist images and attitudes towards the oriental 'Other'.The way the different 'Other' is racially constructed in such a type of literature is no more than a tool exploited by imperialist writers to preserve Western domination and subjugation.In this sense, this paper intends to 'write back' against the hegemonic discourse of British popular romance about Morocco.
This paper adopts a postcolonial approach to analyze the selected novel.The choice of such an approach resides in two main grounds: it is much concerned with the issues of 'colonialist' literature (including romance fiction), and it deals with the concerns of the subaltern colonized 'Other'.This paper falls into two main parts.The first part theorizes and problematizes the construction of racial identities in colonial discourse.This part serves as a preliminary inquiry to understand the convergences and divergences between difference and race.The second part investigates conceptions of racial differences in Rebecca Stratton's The Silken Cage from a postcolonial perspective, in an attempt to display the extent to which these conceptions can be symbolically represented and fictionalized in texts so as to narrate the dominance of the Western 'Self' while constructing a demonized 'Other'.Understanding this sort of narration-construction project is the core issue of this study.

Challenging Racial Identities in Colonial Discourse
In the Western academy, there has been a tendency of narrating the relationship between the East and the West, based on a binary framework of difference.It is undeniable that Edward Said is the most postcolonial figure to disclose this relationship in his landmark book: Orientalism (1978).In Said's viewpoint, Orientalism is all about binary oppositions between the East and the West.In this binarism, the West is represented as the 'Self' and the East as the 'Other'.Said stresses that this system of binarism should be questioned due to its misrepresentation of the Eastern 'Other'.Orientalism tends to feature an unequal relationship between the East and the West.The East, from a Saidian perspective, is a fantasy created by and for the West, and 'race/ethnicity' is a significant marker by which difference between the East and the West is figured in this fantasy framework.
The debate of race and identity has resulted in a serious study of the manifestations of social segregation and imperial greedy purposes embedded in the discourse of difference.
Undoubtedly, human beings share a deep-seated psychological urge to identify diversity and similarity in terms of comparison as an effort to establish their essential identity.This urge implies a fundamental conflict, in that we require diversity in order to distinguish ourselves from others, while at the same time, we find reassurance and comfort in the experience of similarity and belonging to the human race.This point is further concretized while examining types of human discourses and their discriminatory lines of attack and effects.In the course of examining the colonial discourse, therefore, some scholars, among whom Bhabha (1994) avers that "[the] discriminatory effects [of the colonial discourse] are visible in those split subjects of the racist stereotypethe simian Negro, the effeminate Asiatic malewhich ambivalently fix identity as the fantasy of difference."(p.108) Homi Bhabha's avowal that the racial identity of the colonized subjects ambivalently fixes their sense of being and thereby transforms it into an illusion-defining feature of difference is indicative of the discriminatory foundations of the colonial discourse.This ambivalence can be best understood in terms of discussing the relevance of both sameness and difference to the question of identity.
Within the framework of colonial discourse, the colonized people are mostly stigmatized and identified by their 'black' skin colour.The skin colour is the basis on which the colonized subjects' behaviour and thinking is adaptive to the rules of, to use Conrad's notorious catchphrase, "the heart of darkness" where they live.By means of an analogy, the image of Africa as the heart of darkness that has affected the skin colour and thinking of its people coincides with the illusive description of the chameleon, which adapts itself to its surroundings, while adopting disguise techniques of changing colours to protect itself from the dangers of the same surrounding.This analogy also testifies to the ambivalence of the colonial discourse; an ambivalence that creates a sort of tension and disquiet about the manipulators of this colonial discourse.It has been noticed that the same weak points, blackness for example, that stigmatize the colonized subjects are themselves transformed into strong points of resistance against their colonizers when they turn to be a source of anxiety rather than entertainment.According to Bhabha, the colonial discourse acts in such an ambivalent way that it entertains its Western audience with fantastical images of the unusual racial identity defining the colonized subjects, yet it pictures frightening images of black creatures whose 'barbaric' way of life strikingly jeopardizes the Westerners' presence in the colonies unless such barbaric black creatures are tamed.It is, therefore, this ambivalence of the colonial discourse that Bhabha further explicates throughout his academic works, while remaining faithful to discovering the weak points of such discourse, especially in terms of the association of racial identity to difference.
Alison Banton, a Western sociologist, assumes that the colonized people's racial identity is usually associated with the racial hierarchization of human beings in the 18 th century.
As cited by Banton (1977): "In the eighteenth century there had been a strong tendency to rank all the things in the world-mineral objects, vegetables, and animals from the lowest to the highest-as constituting a 'great chain of being'."(p.29) Drawing on the logic of the great chain of being, Banton seems to attribute the emergence of the racist conception of blackness to the early European tendency to rank people according to types and races.At the bottom of the great chain of being, the black races are matched with animal species based on their physical properties (e.g., skin colour, facial features) which purportedly derive from genetic inheritance.
In fact, the need to categorize events, objects and other humans, in order to identify and control them, is part of the psychological makeup of all human beings and plays a fundamental role in the definition of the 'Self' versus the 'Other' in interracial encounters.
In The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action 1780-1850, Philip Curtin provides a description not so different from that of Banton's of the dynamics of early racist theoretical ideas towards black Africans.He speaks of "racial classification" as "a simple system based on skin colour, with a white, red, yellow, and black race, each of them placed on one of the four major continents."(Curtin, 1965, p.38)  attributes.It follows then that it was basically Western biologists, sociologists and anthropologists who initiated the theoretical framework and paved the way for prototype scientific attempts to investigate, especially with regard to conceptions of blackness, race, identity and/or gender.
It has been argued that the scientific revolution in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries provided a muse for the philosophies of Enlightenment.Much focus was placed on the scientific study of human beings in relation to their natural surrounding through observation and comparisons between groups of men and animals.However, objective these procedures might appear at the surface level, they were combined with ready-made judgements as 'rational objective criteria'.More clearly, the need to establish terms of classification means that human beings automatically tend to assign hierarchical scales to the categories they define regardless of the obvious dangers implied when such a mechanism is applied to the categorization of different races.One possible way of establishing categories for human racial differences, as aforementioned, is through the scientific method.However, the danger remains that the assigning hierarchical and value scales could be used to rationalize many other subconscious drives which are in actual fact aimed at the exploitation and domination of others.
All in all, the need to establish a conception of human difference based on racial and gender considerations remain a deep-seated human urge and a vital source for identification.
In the subsequent section, the focus will be shifted to analysing how racial identities, as a human marker of cultural difference, are constructed in Rebecca Stratton's narrative The Silken Cage, adopting a postcolonial approach.

Racializing the Moroccan 'Other' in Rebecca Stratton's The Silken Cage
It is noteworthy that the process of mapping differences in the colonial discourse is a discursive strategy that fuels the circulation of ready-made judgments about the colonial 'Other'.This process entails inviting the question of 'race' into the show.Race, in this regard, should be understood as the dividing force that enables the enactment of stereotypical and discriminatory assumptions regarding cultures and peoples.These discriminatory stereotypes, located in an imaginary Western niche, are based on features or signifiers designed to make the 'Other' visible and natural.Within the framework of cultural and postcolonial studies, ethnic affiliations determine, in a sense, the identity of an individual.This view has become commonsensical and intuitive knowledge in the West.This perception gives a sense of plausibility or vraisemblance to the mode of racial representation.The function of the colonial stereotype is, as Bhabha (1994) asserts, "to 'normalize' the multiple beliefs and split subjects that constitute colonial discourse as a consequence of its process of disavowal."(p.74)However, this process of "normalization" is always threatened by the differences of the Other's skin colour and culture: "it is that possibility of difference and circulation which would liberate the signifier of skin/culture from the fixations of racial typology."(Bhabha,p.75)It is in this context that this paper tries to analyse how Morocco, as subject and a culture, is racialized in Rebecca Straton's orientalist romance The Silken Cage.
Stratton's racialization of the Moroccan 'Other' in The Silken Cage uncovers the limits of Western mode of representation.Arabs, for instance, occupy a narrow space in the Western imagination.They are mostly associated with certain descriptions like backward, dark, barbaric, savages and exotic, as the following excerpt from the novel indicates: "Again, he half turned his head, and she sensed the narrowing of his eyes rather than saw it.'You believe him be in danger?' he demanded.'From me?' Her silence was confirmation enough, and his voice roughened with anger.
'So__ you still think me a barbarian, eh?' 'Those men who came running out the other night were armed with rifles,' Troy reminded him.'But they did not fire!Your brother will not be shot for what he has done, mademoiselle; whatever your opinion, we are not savages!"(Stratton, 1981, p.96)This act of lumping all Moroccans together under the same heading (barbarians and savages) runs counter to any attempt to acknowledge cultural differences and a denial of the Other's capability to do any better and be helpful to escape the effects of their Western construction.The wordings being blithely expressed may contribute to keep up these prejudices incarnated in the racial discourse.Interestingly, labelling Moroccans, or Arabs in general, as such has "become repeatedly recharged and displaced under the pressure both historical change and of a continuing history of racial identification and 'othering.'"(Harrison, 2003, p.72)Each nation has its own "racial tag" in the Western mindset as a badge for distinction.In Just Like Tomorrow, Guène (2006) (Stratton, 1981, p.83)This attribute of savagery contributes to the description of the 'Other' as being exotic and, thus, categorized within a unique narrative construction.This mode of describing the oriental 'Other' has become, using Bhabha's dictum, "the language metaphor [that] raises the question of cultural difference."(Bhabha, 1994, p.177)This can, yet, be an agent of repositioning the subject and make it unique and powerful through its difference.This racial difference is typified in the adjectives attributed to the natives as a sign of their race and as an obstacle to Western recognition of the oriental 'Other'.
The 'colonial' language is an indicator of racial difference exploited by Rebecca Stratton to shift the subject position from being a 'subjective subject' to a 'critical subject'.
This shift does, essentially, require an awareness of such difference as being a 'knowledge value' that enables the 'Other' to value the local culture through recognizing the ambivalence of the so-called 'colonial authority'.However, in postcolonial/colonial encounters, the natives mostly forgo their language through adopting the colonizers'.This reflection brings to the fore the effects of French imperialism on North Africans' identity, as it is clearly manifested in Kadir Ben Rachid's conversations with Troy Darrel, especially when he code switches from English to French: "'Persuasion is my aim, ma chère, to persuade you that I am not the barbarian you have though me, nor the cold-blooded creature you__' 'Never!' Troy insisted swiftly.'I never thought you cold-blooded, Kadir!'" (Stratton, 1981, p.189)The utilization of Postcolonialism, as an area where the discourse of difference is explored and problematized in relation to race and identity, is better taken as a critical scholarship that has based the end of its political agenda on two major goals.The first is the destabilization, dismantling, and subversion of the essentialist discourses.The second is the articulation of cultural difference based on correcting the misinterpretations and misrepresentations of the colonized past that still affects the present.Stated simply, the colonized past can be revived, rehashed and reshaped in a way that opens up the possibility for the articulation of cultural difference that does not conflict with the political agenda of postcolonialism.Undoubtedly, this paper has some limits and limitations.Much focus, for instance, in this paper has been put on the discourse of 'race', but other areas such as 'gender', 'space', 'culture', 'religion', and 'class' can be subject to analysis as far as popular romance is concerned.Besides, it would have been of great importance to make a comparative study between romances and other popular narratives, such as travel, detective, and captivity literary works.Having said that, it is noteworthy that the ultimate purpose of this paper has been to draw attention to 'race' as an order of discourse materialized in popular romance.This paper is then expected to bring into light the importance of studying imperial popular romance in terms of its colonial and cultural discourses.It is also expected to show that colonial discourse has no limits or barriers, but goes across time and space, across 'high culture' and 'popular culture'.
Said (1978)rtmentalizing people into categories such as races or 'types', there arises a problem of arrangement.In this respect, the key problem with this mode of categorization is that the processes of selection regarding what ought to count as 'racial' and therefore 'natural' differences are themselves inextricably linked to the existence of cultural norms concerning what defines a 'difference' as peculiarly 'racial'.The criteria of differentiation between what are designated as 'races' may be established as a result of other factors that have a predominantly social dimension and are related to, for instance, socially determined questions of power and representation.This particular point has been made by writers such as Edward Said.In his book, Orientalism,Said (1978)argues that the concept of the 'oriental' -taken in the sense of both a subject and a cultureas outlined in the European discipline of 'orientalism' is, in fact, a projection of European concepts and values on to the 'oriental' subject.Thus, supposedly 'objective' racial descriptions of the oriental can be read as expressions of the European imperialist desire to conceptualise and thereby control the identity of the colonised subject.Equally, when the oriental is discussed in unconstructive terms (for example, by attributing the characteristic of barbarity, irrationality and immaturity), this too can be interpreted, following Bhabha's line of reasoning, as a projection of Western fears rather than an accurate description of the oriental subject's 'racial' and 'cultural' states: "it's so funny to call the Arabs 'Fatima', all the blacks 'Mamadou' and all the Chinese 'Ping-Pong'."(p.6)To draw a kind of analogy, Troy Darrel says to Kadir Ben Rachid: "You're a savage!' she accused wildly when he remained grimly silent.'Only a savage would do what you're doing!Put me down, I'm perfectly capable of walking __ put me down!' (Emphasis is mine).