Rabat, Morocco – In a significant intellectual and critical contribution that deconstructs the structures of Western cultural discourse toward the Arab and Islamic world,
Moroccan researcher Zouhair Soukah has recently published
a new book entitled “Travel Literature and Collective Memory:
The Orient in German Cultural Representations,” through the Jordanian
publishing house “Khutout wa Dhilal” and the Saudi publishing house “Rawai’ al-Kutub.”
The author has also revised an academic doctoral dissertation
that he defended a decade ago at Heinrich Heine University in Germany.
This work represents a valuable addition to the critical literature concerned
with postcolonial studies and the analysis of Orientalist discourse.
The enduring memory of the Orientalist phenomenon
The book begins with the central premise that travel literature is not merely a geographical movement between places,
but rather a “journey through memory” and a vital medium for German collective memory.
The work examines what it describes as the “memorial continuity of
the Orientalist phenomenon” or “intertextuality in memory.”
It also points out that the stereotypes formulated by 19th-century travelers
regarding the concept of “Oriental” despotism, the status of women,
and the predatory cultural divide between “East” and “West” have not faded with time.
Instead, they have become an authentic and deeply ingrained archive within German memory,
continuing to exert a guiding influence even on contemporary political stances.
Beyond Edward Said: Memory and the Persistence of Orientalist Discourse
Following in the footsteps of the late thinker Edward Said, but from a different analytical and conceptual perspective,
the book explains that Said focused his project on discourse as a tool of hegemony and domination.
In contrast, the work of researcher Sukha focuses on memory
as a tool for the survival and continuity of this discourse over time.
Contemporary German history and policies toward the Arab region
cannot be interpreted in isolation from this cultural and memory-based context.
It transforms the “Orient” into a perpetual mirror for affirming the idealized European “self” and its perceived superiority.
Constructing the “Western” self as a modern, developed, and rational entity
The book highlights how the German traveler, both past and present, does not encounter a stark reality
or untouched territory when visiting historical centers like Fez, Cairo, Damascus, or Baghdad.
Rather, he carries in his bags a mental archive burdened with images
and clichés that predetermine what should be narrated and how it should be interpreted.
From this perspective, European identity has been shaped through an exclusionary act of remembering
based on the formula: “We only know ourselves by remembering what we are not.”
The “Oriental” other is thus reproduced as a static entity mired in the past and lacking rationality.
Conversely, the “Western” self is constructed as a modern, developed, and rational entity.
Critiquing exclusionary structures and building a shared human future
In his intellectual conclusions, the author argues that cultures
and societies will remain captive to imagined representations based on Western centrism.
He warns that this will persist unless the mechanisms of collective memory are critiqued and deconstructed.
This publication represents a serious call to explore the implicit threads connecting
an Orientalist travelogue written two centuries ago with a political decision made today,
warning against the transformation of the scars of Orientalist memory into a barrier
that obscures the plurality of human meaning. This, in turn, shapes the present and future in an exclusionary manner.
