Abstract

The Moroccan landscape with its cultural diversity and historical heritage has always been a tourist destination for early British travel literature and colonial fictional representations. Drawing on postcolonial theory and iconographic geography as conceptual paradigms, this study explores the theme of imagining Morocco as terra nullius and sexually feminized geography in British travel writing and literature with particular focus on Walter Harris’s Morocco That Was (1921) and Margaret Rome’s Bride of the Rif (1972). It unravels the discursive connections of gender and colonialism by demonstrating how this interplay legitimizes imperial domination. With this in mind, this scholarly inquiry examines how the existential ontology of the Moroccan cultural memory is de-materialized and thus (mis)represented as abstract idea instead of picturing it as tangibly concrete realia in the Orientalist literary imagery. In this frame of reference, this paper emerges as a critical attempt to revisit the discursive ways in which Morocco is framed as sexually eroticized female body. This feminizing metaphor is surfaced in the analyzed texts through the symbolic association of Morocco with the recurrent trope of the ‘virgin land’ (Shohat, 1991). In the explored narratives, such invasive strategy is recounted in expansionist fashions that ultimately justify the interventionist policy of imperial conquest and warrant foreign political control