Going Arab or Berber: The Use of Disguise by Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century British and French Travelers to North Africa
For more than two centuries travelers from the West—that is, middle class and aristocratic citizens from the imperial centers of Europe and the United States—have written accounts about their visits to North Africa and the Middle East. There is much analysis of these accounts, but few, if any, have considered that so many of these travelers traveled in disguise—bluntly put, once in the “East” they went “Arab”. This gesture is the more remarkable, for unlike the familiar notion of “going native” this gesture was for temporary, sometimes touristic purposes, usually justified in practical terms, and often inflected with what we now know as a liberal politics of identification with the “other”.
Yet, “going Arab” is not only a fantasy but also the source of a great deal of pleasure, all of which mediates the politics of imperialism and anti-imperialism, in the 19th century and our own time.In this paper I will consider several notable examples (Burton, Blunt, Cunninghame-Graham, Bell, Lawrence, and Eberhardt) mostly British, from the 19th and early 20th century, as a first step towards unpacking a strange fantasy of the “East” which still haunts the consciousness of the “West” today—this shadowy “Arab” is still with us!
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