Tritha Abdelaziz |
My full name is Tritha Abdelaziz. I am a doctoral student at the Faculty of Art and Humanities, El Jadida, Morocco. I am a holder of Cultural studies Master degree from the Faculty of Art and Humanities, Dhar el Mahraz, Fes. I have got also a Master degree from Universita Della Svizzera Italiana,Switzerland. I am currently working on a doctoral thesis entitled Europe through North African travelers’ and Acrobats’ Eyes (19th and 20th Centuries). My research area includes also issues related to the analysis of postcolonial literature and travel narratives as well as anthropological accounts. I am an administrator at Hassan the Second Hospital Centre, Fes.
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north african acrobats to the west: towards an archival memory and occidentalist counter literature |
Though hidden in plain sight and aesthetically relegated to the margin of history, North African acrobats to the West are critical terrains that shift the spotlight downwards, signal new versions of the inscription of Otherness and recreate the absent/present agency of North African acrobats as active interlocutors and ‘dissenting voices’. They remain valuable archival material that challenge the orientalist orthodoxies and Western clashing tropes in particular; they are emphatically alter(native) discourses of difference that run counter the binary mainstream trope and the fixed taxonomy of East vs West. My particular interest is in Hassan Ben Ali’s Troupe, Ben Achmet’s stories, Zahra Kader’s experience in America and Zahar Tahar’s conception of otherness. These North African acrobats have various and culturally inspired accounts. I argue that these acrobatic experiences formulate a parallel occidentalist discourse that tries to create a counter-discursive narrative or rather a North African ‘voyage in’. It shows how they have turned into examiners and eye-witnesses from within Western contexts. Using a postcolonial micro- historicist approach, this paper aims at undermining both the orientalist discourse and the occidentalist thesis premised upon Hassan Hanafi’s Muqaddima fi Ilm al-Istighrab (An Introduction to Occidentalism). |