From Exchange to Change

Many Moroccan travelers have decided to represent their personal and cultural contacts with the West through a variety of fiction and non-fiction productions. While some of them devoted their accounts to the description of their experiences with the European way of life, others preferred to incorporate the American space into their writings. The aim of these travel accounts on America was to put on display the way Moroccans understand American culture and interact with American people and how they destabilise the foundations of the imperial dualities of Self/Other, Center/Periphery with a view to defusing obsolete worn-out stereotypes and instead diffusing and maintaining a discourse of constructive mutual understanding and cooperation. In this regard, the experiences of Moroccan Fulbrighters are worth researching and documenting. They have traveled to America as either students, teachers, professionals, scholars, or researchers and returned to Morocco with diverse perceptions, insights, and experiences. However, these experiences have never attracted much attention and interest within the Moroccan academic and cultural circles and thus remained under-researched.