The year 2014 marked the 65th anniversary of the publication of Paul Bowles novel Sheltering Sky (1949) and resulted in a republication of his work, in which the American couple Port and Kit Moresby wander the North African desert after WWII in quest of self discovery. For an American expatriate such as Bowles who has made Tangier, Morocco his home for most of his life, it is interesting to see that the desert remains a site of intrigue and an exotic space where his characters wander. In this paper, I examine Bowles’ bourgeois characters’ imagining of the Arab/Muslim Other through the lens of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality in order to illuminate the author’s Orientalist fascination with the desert. Bowles authorizes himself to speak for the Other and positions his characters in a dialectic of attraction/repulsion with the Arab. I argue that the desert as a space facilitates this cultural binary and situates the presumably lost “Western” souls in an unequal power relation to the Other, in their search for the “exotic”. Making use of intersectionality theory allows us to better untangle the structures of power associated with race, class and gender between the Westerner and the Arab who is rendered the Other even when he is in the desert: a space of madness and deadness that the characters encounter on their quest for the exotic. By virtue of Bowles leaving America and settling in Tangier, rather than interrogating his own “Otherness” he creates a narrative that states the inevitable Western domination: Bowles simply, cannot escape, his Orientalist urges.

This paper aims to contextualize the work of contemporary Moroccan photographer Lalla Essaydi within a globalized art world and as an artist who transcends regional borders in her occupation of multiple physical spaces. Essaydi grew up in Marrakesh, Morocco, studied in Paris, France, lived in Saudi Arabia, and now divides her time between the United States and Morocco. Her work engages with female identity in a postcolonial Moroccan context wherein she seeks to disrupt the West’s longstanding tradition of voyeuristic obsession with the female Arab body. Essaydi’s work depicts a fantasy-like space that explicitly engages with the Orientalist art historical tradition. Her collection, Les Femmes du Maroc (2005-2008), depicts a domesticized fantasy of female bonding, but with direct reference to Orientalist paintings of 19th century France by artists like Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. She frames her work around Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism (1978), as she looks to subvert a narrative that promotes Western hegemony over the East, not just politically, but socially and sexually as well. Her photo Grande Odalisque 2 (2008) is a direct response to Ingres’ iconic painting, La Grande Odalisque (1814), which is recognized for its beauty and exoticism- the key elements of Orientalism. While Ingres’ painting lures the viewer into a tale of silks and sex, Essaydi looks to correct the Western fantasy of Orientalism through a photographic retelling that strips away the exoticized characteristics of Ingres’ painting while simultaneously recreating the image. After examining her collection Les Femmes du Maroc, I argue that Essaydi does not subvert Orientalist themes enough, and that she engages in a neo-Orientalism that is a consequence of a globalized art world, which places a stress on the artist to appeal to a broader, international audience. Essaydi uses Moroccan women as her models and reclaims a space that was arrogated by the French artist; however, her collection title is in French rather than Arabic. In addition, the “femme du Maroc,” or Moroccan woman, that she depicts is still one of fantasy. The women’s skin, and the cream colored fabric that drapes their bodies, are covered in Arabic writing done in henna. They blend into a matching background, creating a monochromatic image. While her work provides a platform in which the Orientalist narrative is questioned, she engages with more than she subverts this discourse which conveys a still-present colonial legacy that thrives in previously colonized places- in this case, Morocco.

This paper proposes archiving the Emirate of Granada via Arabic literature and the works of Iraqi poet ‘Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati in particular to document the historical moments preceding and following the Capitulation of Granada which took place on January 2, 1492 and brought about the end of Muslim rule in Spain. I argue that these works form the basis of a “methodologically and epistemologically disobedient approach” to the archive, to borrow Maria Elena Martínez’s phrasing, since a pre-1492 archive does not currently exist at the Alhambra. The historical circumstances of al-Andalus, I argue, are fused with the poet’s subjective experiences either in Spain or Iraq to create multi-sensory images of human memory. In doing so, al-Bayati creates a poetic intervention of sorts with his work not only to reflect on historical and imaginative constructions of al-Andalus, but to compel us to think of alternatives to the way we historicize these very moments whether in a pre-1492 world or a modern one. While the notion of creating a historical archive with ephemera has been studied in the context of Latin American literatures, this has yet to be thoroughly explored in the Arabic literary tradition. Roberto González Echevarría, in the case of Latin America, posits, “[c]an one truly know the Other without doing violence to him or her and to his or her culture? Is contamination with Western culture desirable; will it not bring about destruction? It is possible to write about one’s knowledge of the Other without distorting his or her culture beyond recognition?” With this in mind, it is necessary to read these texts not just for the aesthetic and ephemeral qualities, but also as a type of historical document, allowing the “Other” to write about and for his/her own culture without fear of such distortion. What effects would the creation of an “othered” archive that includes Arabic literature have in the way we approach and understand the events of 1492 and their ramifications in not only a postcolonial Arab society but in the formation of a decolonial history? By relying upon materials produced by the colonized, the oppressed, and the marginalized, we can rewrite history regardless of how “disobedient” such historical documents may be.