Tourist Productions 2005

The first part of my project will consist of written analysis and an attempt at a “thick description” of a trip to Morocco, considering several perspectives of such a visit taken from diverse vantage points. First, I will attempt to reconstruct my first time visit to Morocco, paying particular attention to how my own preconceptions and (mis)understanding of the culture shaped the tourist experience. Here, I am also interested in exploring the – not altogether reliable - role of imagination and memory in the process of understanding and making sense of the tourist experience.

Next, I will consider the experience of an expatriate Moroccan during his first visit to Morocco, after having lived in the United States for ten years. I will take into account the ways in which immigrant experience in the United States, which fashioned a new relation to himself and his homeland, played an integral role in the tourist experience.

Finally, (and this is still a provisional idea that might have to be abandoned because it is so problematic) I will briefly attempt to reflect on the tourist experience of a globetrotting 15 month old. I will explore the ways in which infants and children are treated in Morocco in contrast to the United States and how this influences their experience and perception of the world.

My analysis will explore the themes of hybridity, displacement, estrangement and belonging. In my theoretical examination, I will attempt to answer the question of how these various travel experiences were transformational. Considering a performative tourism, I will explore the ways in which acts of travel did something to the traveler.

My working bibliography includes:

Asad, Muhammad. 1954. The road to Mecca. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Hargraves, Orin. 1995. Culture Shock! Morocco: A Guide to Customs and Etiquette. Portland: Times Editions.

Kapchan, Deborah A. 1996. Gender on the market : Moroccan women and the revoicing of tradition. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of piety : the Islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Nguyen, Tram. 2005. We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant America After 9/11.Beacon Press.

Pearson, Mike, and Julian Thomas. 1994. Theatre/Archaeology. TDR 38, no. 4:133-161.

Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism.1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books.

Slyomovics, Susan. 2005. The performance of human rights in Morocco. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Urry, John. 1990. The tourist gaze : leisure and travel in contemporary societies. London ; Newbury Park: Sage Publications.

Visweswaran, Kamala. 1994. Fictions of feminist ethnography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

The second part of my project will consist in the production of an art object which will incorporate a collage of a voices and impressions of Morocco. This impressionistic montage of thoughts and reflections will be composed of mixed media and will also be a triptych of narratives. The process of creation will serve as a vehicle for processing the tourist experience. The finished object will become a souvenir, a memory trigger. It is also an attempt to construct an object that will aid in the telling of the narrative(s) of a trip to Morocco. In this sense, it is an alternative or a compliment to the conventional travel books and guides. It will show what the tourist (advertising) industry doesn’t want you to see.

I found the article Theatre/Archeology extremely useful in thinking about both the content and methodological approaches to my project. The dialectical nature of the essay, which includes a discourse between two archeologists of which one is also a theatre practitioner and theorist, is in itself a model for the multi-layered approach to description and analysis I am interested in undertaking. The article co-authored by Mike Pearson and Julian Thomas, not only shows the dialogue between two scholars, but also displays the evolution of the idea of the potential meeting points between the disciplines of theatre and archeology, as it occurs over time. Pearson in particular revises his notions of theatre archeology as a result of the dialogue with Thomas as seen in his second entry in the essay.

Pearson proposes the deployment of the terminology and methodology of description borrowed from the disciplines of archeology, forensic science, and contemporary recording practices of the music industry for the retrieval, reconstruction and (re)presentation of theatre. His discussion of “foreigners” as those “perceiving different orders of connotative meaning, albeit brief, signals potentially interesting approaches in the study and description of cross-cultural tourist experience. (134) His reflections on the reconstruction of performance such as: “One thing that the watcher puts into narrative is time, the time of reflection of reexperiencing and inflating the fleeting image by replaying it over and over in the memory”, can be useful in relation to the description of tourism.

Pearson’s suggests that the archeological “site report” might be an instructive practice for someone attempting to reconstruct ephemeral phenomena such as performance. (136) His description of the “base elements” of performance: space, time, pattern, detail and object, is can be a useful model in approaching the description of the tourist experience. (137, 150) I was particularly interested in reading his discussion of the documentation of performance as an integration of narratives vis a vis my own project of documentation of the travel experience. (146)