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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal – Vol. 10, No. 5

Publication Date: May 25, 2023

DOI:10.14738/assrj.105.14763.

El Aatefi, K. (2023) The History of European Stereotypes and Allegories of Representation of North Africans: Continuity Narratives

and Shifting Paradigms. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 10(5).234-252.

Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom

The History of European Stereotypes and Allegories of

Representation of North Africans: Continuity Narratives

and Shifting Paradigms

Khalid El Aatefi

Faculty of Languages, Letters and Arts,

Ibn Tofail University, Kenitra, Morocco

ABSTRACT

The representational politics of European cinema and literature were effectively

determinant in shaping and reflecting the values and the ideologies of the dominant

parties in dealing with encounters and representing cultural difference.

Conditioned by the synchronous historical and political contexts, the work of

stereotyping has persisted and Continued in deploying almost the same tropes and

metaphors of representation that have been in operation since the medieval ages,

constructing a logic of binarization of encounters on asymmetrical grounds. This

article explores the genealogy of representation of North Africans in European

cinema and literature, focusing on the metamorphosis of its dominant tropes and

stereotypes over centuries. It addresses the ways fictional representation of North

Africans, especially Moroccans, reinforce the orientalizing discourse of power,

domination, and hegemonic construction of cultural difference on stereotypical and

judgmental basis. It suggests that the visual and literary representation of North

Africans has constantly kept appearing, disappearing, shifting and redefining in

response to the prevailing political and historical contexts that shaped encounters

between Europeans and North Africans. To track the mutation of the stereotype, its

intertextuality and its hierarchical structures of power, Edward Said’s colonial

discourse analysis and Homi Bhabha’s conceptualization of the stereotype will be

used as theoretical frameworks in this article.

Keywords: The stereotype, colonial cinema, representation, cultural difference,

mutation, migration

INTRODUCTION

Stereotypes are forms of knowledge that are produced, transmitted and circulated among the

members of dominant communities or groups, representing a dichotomous perception of truth

as pure judgement of the complex relation between the self and the other. Stereotypes about

other communities and cultures or cultural groups rely substantially on a system of beliefs and

binary classifications shared by members of the dominant cultural group and serve as

boundaries between people. They constitute a un/conscious system of representations and

categorizations pursuing the exercise of power and the ascription of groups with certain

cultural and social "truths". Stereotyping is a classificatory cultural pattern that entrenches

other ethnicities in offensive, funny and mocking attributes fortified by a process of

normalization of long-existing images and approved by boundaries of power, domination and

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El Aatefi, K. (2023) The History of European Stereotypes and Allegories of Representation of North Africans: Continuity Narratives and Shifting

Paradigms. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 10(5).234-252.

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.105.14763

rejection. Stereotypes, which can be both negative and positive, are generated over periods of

time and through encounters with other people and cultures, framing a form of categorizing/

classifying of cultural encounters adopted and structured by the biased knowledge of the

dominant people or groups to make sense of the unfamiliar and the foreign. Stereotypes and

prejudices are closely associated with a lack of impartiality and conscious bias in the

representation of cultural forms and the identity of minorities or ethnicities with subjective

modes of portrayal, which create a profound essentialization of cultural discourse and

perpetuate cultural identities of “others” as pre-established categories.

The game of stereotyping of European cinema and literature has continued for centuries and

metamorphosed according to the shifting social, political, and cultural determinants of each

period of history. It is resurrective as it keeps appearing, disappearing, changing and

metamorphosing according to time, context and political mood. The Crusades, the oil embargo,

the gulf war, the wars of liberation, colonization, the invasion of Iberia by Muslims, the hijab

affair are historical contexts and cultural events that influenced European cinema in the

construction of Muslim cultural identity and the transformation of its tropes and metaphors.

While renaissance drama and precolonial paintings and writing produced a range of

stereotypes that perpetuate the devilishness, savagery, barbarism and exoticism of native

North African people and geography for the sake of Christianization or the confirmation of

cultural superiority , Colonial cinema and the turn of the century literature displayed an

intertextual politics and loyalty to the classical regime of knowledge and misrepresentation,

juxtaposing the enlightened and superior Europe to the dark and backward Africa as a prelude

to colonization and domination. It reflected as well the metamorphosis of geographical tropes

and the persistence of cultural metaphors of imperialism that fed on legitimatization and

politicization of colonial intent. In post-terrorist attacks cinema, the representation of North

Africans has perpetuated new tropes and stereotypes that associate immigrants with cultural

anxieties and threat to identity, but a part of this cinema has contributed to the humanization

of immigrants by highlighting the circumstances that drive them to leave their homelands.

THE STEREOTYPE: THE ARTICULATION OF DIFFERENCE, CULTURAL ANXIETIES AND

THE TRAP OF AMBIVALENCE

The stereotype “signifies prejudiced and socially widespread ideas about foreigners” [1:3] that

excludes ‘subaltern’ members of the out/in-group for their social, cultural or geographical

difference. Even within the boundaries of one society/ community, stereotypes represent a

kind of articulated perceptions among in-group members that articulate difference in terms of

gender, age, class, occupation, religion and geography. Samovar and Porter defines stereotypes

as “perceptions or beliefs we hold about groups or individuals based on previously formed

attitudes of opinions” [2:280]. Shweinitz states that, “stereotypes are standardized conceptions

of people, primarily based on an individual’s belonging to a category (usually race, nation,

professional role, social class, or gender) or the possession of characteristic traits symbolizing

one of these categories” [1:3]. The stereotype is "a cognitive structure that contains a

perceiver’s knowledge, beliefs and expectations about human groups" [3:599]. Stereotypes

subsume overgeneralized attitudes and simplified perceptions of other people and their

cultures, associating them with definite attributes and assumptions and involving great deal of

distortions and fallacies. While the stereotype is an over generalized and simplified knowledge

of outgroup, the prejudice is defined as a refusing attitudes against individuals. It is the "unfair,

biased, or intolerant attitudes or opinions towards another person or a groups simply because

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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal (ASSRJ) Vol. 10, Issue 5, May-2023

Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom

they belong to a specific religion, race, nationality or another group" [2: 281] The prejudice

represents a middle position between stereotyping and discrimination since it embraces an

explicit rejection of others. Pettigrew and Meertens differentiate between two types of

prejudices; "blatant prejudices", which are overt of forms of discrimination and "subtle

prejudices", which are covert or implicit forms of rejection [4].

These categorizations of groups and over generalizations are mediated and fortified through a

variety of media like jokes, literature, cinema and other types of media. Many ethnic groups, in

diasporic communities, are racially victimized because of their cultural “otherness” by being

discriminated against them when it comes to employment, education and housing because the

dominant cultural discourse tends to attribute derogatory characteristics to "others", and

define them as belonging to ‘under class’ minority to confirm its superior cultural presence. In

the context of immigration, subtle or overt stereotyping is expressed mainly by, for example,

putting blame on "others", highlighting their lack of responsibility, cooperation and their

competitiveness. From the dominant viewpoint, the stereotype may represent an integral part

of the nature of the subordinate group. The stereotype is characterized by generalization and

strengthened by repetition and historical transmutation in the literary and fictional traditions

of dominant cultures.

In socio-psychological discourse, Walter Lippmann defines stereotypes “as pictures in our

heads” [1: 4]. that can be standardized to become concrete truths taken for granted by members

of the dominant group. In social sciences, stereotypes are defined in a range of attributes; they

function as mental fixation of people (stability), they submit to consensus and standardization

(conformity), they rely on few characteristics (reduction), they are socially communicated and

have the cliché effect [1:5]. In humanities and linguistics, stereotypes take the form of

standardized expressions, recurrent patterns of narration and fixed colocations born out of

alliance between paralinguistic usage and language system conventionalized over the course of

time and experience change according to social context. For Riffaterre, literary prose

stereotypes are clichés of verbal nature; they are fixed lexeme connections, being banal, but

“categorized as the Gadus and Parnassum and recommended as a ‘pleasant phrase’” [1: 16-17].

In effect and reception studies, Ruth Amossy, argues that the stereotype is interpreted within

reception aesthetics and has to do with “the reader’s cultural memory” in kind of compliance

between the text and the reader. Albert Memi states that the “stereotype is produced and

perpetuated in the plural” [1:20]. This collective marking in the plural is coupled with object

fixation (turning into object). The cliché enables the dominant discourse to give a legal picture

to its illegal practices. It helps dominant colonialist and orientalist ideologies to appear normal

and unquestionable. In this passage, Albert Memi talks about the characteristics of the

stereotype as contagion, which renders the colonized/ subaltern/ immigrant passive and

subject to as internalizing process:

The accusation disturbs him and worries him even more because he admires and fears his

powerful accuser. ‘Is not partially, right?’ he mutters. ‘Are we not all a little guilty after all?’ lazy,

because we have so many idlers? Timid, because we let ourselves be oppressed’. Willfully

created and spread by the colonizer, this mythical and degrading portrait ends up by being

accepted and lived with to a certain extent by the colonized. It thus requires a certain amount

of reality and contributes to the portrait of the colonized... He ends up recognizing it as one

would a detested nickname, which has become a familiar description [5:83].