To browse Academia. Several Moroccan and Spanish literary discourses converge in Tangier, their interpretation from a semiotic and anthropologic representation of the space raise controversies. The study and analysis of a literary and artistic corpus can improve our understanding in the different ways in which the city is presented as no place and show how art and literature are artistic facts integrated in the semiospheric frame of culture and therefore correspond to the various approaches to Tangier made by the authors.
Observing the tables realized by the Bohemian engraver Wenceslaus Hollar in , during his official visit to the new English colony of Tangier, you get the impression that you are looking at a European town, instead of a settlement on the North African coasts. From an urban perspective, in few years the town acquired features which made it look familiar, in order to reassure those people in England who dreamt of the splendid future the new base would be doomed to.
But the reality of the situation was quite another: the orderly appearance of the sloping roof houses, the steady roads and the magnificent bowling court hid all the concerns and fears of a constantly under siege town. A town which every day was compelled to deal with a different world, sometimes obscure, certainly hostile. Stuck between a frequently furious sea harried by corsairs and the fierce ranks of Moroccan sovereigns, the settlers saw their imperial dream changing soon into a sunny nightmare which forced them to leave Tangier after only twenty years of occupation.
The city was relegated to the oblivion by the British historiography and only recently historians have taken interest again of this murky chapter about the British colonial events.
Indeed it lends itself to numerous considerations about the European perception of Northern Africa, which is so near but so difficult to comprehend and penetrate at the same time. Thanks to the studying of the iconographical material and the correspondence of the English Board of Trade, this presence is an attempt to point out the urban arrangement of the colony and the administrative and social problems concerning the brief history of British Tangier from to Every society, in writing its own history, writes the rime of its rooting; and through this gesture, it projects onto the past that which, in the present, remains concealed.
