Morocco: Re-staging colonialism for the masses
Résumé
In this chapter, we will reflect on the selling of such ‘colonial nostalgia’ and on some of its practical implications for contemporary Moroccan mass tourism. What we will try to highlight is how, in some places and some moments in time, tourist experiences are translated into the production of a set of (often banal) practices that often (playfully) challenge the global(ised) representations that inscribe and promote those very practices (see Baeherenholdt et al. 2004). By drawing attention to such instances, we hope to, on the one hand, deflect (at least in part) the usual criticism leveled at mass cultural tourism - that is, its presumed reliance on ‘false’ and static (neo)colonial images of other cultures (see Minca 2007); on the other, we wish to underscore how such instances often support a much more mundane interpretation of tourism and of the culture that they help produce (see Crang 1999; 2004; 2006; Crouch 2004; 2005; Edensor 2001; 2006). The tourist ‘staging of the colonial’, in all its banality and sometime vulgarity, contributes in fact to mobilizing people, capital and images, while also materially transforming places and the meanings attached to them (see Henderson and Weisgrau 2007).
Following a brief genealogy of mass tourism in Morocco, we focus our attention on the new ‘cultural’ turn in Moroccan tourism. In particular, we highlight some of the processes of the restaging of the colonial for the masses in the Marrakech medina, building on our previous research on this topic (Borghi 2008a; Minca 2006; Borghi and Minca 2003). Tourism in Marrakech and, more specifically, the tourist colonization of the medina (see, for example, Escher et al. 2001a; 2001b) provides a particularly important focus for our central argument, also because the implications that these processes have and are likely to have in the future development of mass tourism in the rest of the country.
The opening up of Moroccan skies to low-cost European airlines a few years ago has, de facto, brought Marrakech much closer to European tourist markets, favoring the growth of new forms of cultural mass tourism. In Marrakech, and especially in its increasingly gentrified medina, the objectification and sacralisation of certain aspects of Moroccan life assumes almost grotesque manifestations, reflected in the tourists’ own performances. This is due both to a grossly oversimplified understanding of ‘Arab life’ and to the fact that tourists must depend on local ‘mediators’ and local organizations to help them negotiate complex urban spaces that would otherwise be extremely difficult to approach or even reach. As this chapter will suggest, in such spaces aestheticised colonial nostalgia is coupled with an extraordinary degree of banality in tourist practices. The way in which such massified banal practices dialogue with representations produced and promoted by the media and by tour operators is an intriguing and partially overlooked field of investigation, at least in the Moroccan context.
Domaines
Géographie
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