Memories of a Solitary Cruise : Soufiane Ababri

This tragi-comic news suddenly reveals the strength of collective belief mechanisms and in this case raises the question of how exoticism influences the way the ‘exotic subject’ is perceived and how he is determined as other. Soufiane Ababri uses parodic tools to deconstruct the multiple layered construction of what exoticism should be in the eyes of a Western viewer.

He will wander among Edward Said’s writings such as Orientalism and known as one of the most influential scholarly books of the 20th century. In that essay, Said examines Western scholarship of the “Orient,” specifically of the ArabIslamic world argues that early scholarship by Westerners in that region was biased and projected a false and stereotyped vision of “otherness” on the Islamic published in 1978 world that facilitated and supported Western colonial policy.