Race as a 'Sign of Difference' in Romance Discourse

Here's the abstract:

With the emergence of postcolonial criticism, a big deal of interest was allotted to attack male agents of Orientalism, ignoring in turn Western women’s role in the imperial project. Within the framework of orientalist discourse, this paper examines the politics of racial construction in Rebecca Stratton’s imperial romance The Silken Cage. It uncovers how such construction is based on the myth of racial differences to inferiorize and primitivize the Moroccan ‘Other’. Stratton’s novel is worthy of examination due to its commercialization of the Moroccan men and women in the literary tradition. This paper adopts a postcolonial approach. After the analysis of the suggested novel, it was found that, like other male imperial writers, Stratton participates in the racial construction of the Moroccan ‘Other’ as an antithesis of the Western ‘subjects.’ The ‘white’ heroine is constructed at the top level of human categorization, and the Moroccan ‘black’ man and woman come at the bottom. The skin color is the core issue of racial differences between the Western ‘Self’ and the oriental ‘Other’. Stratton’s imperial romance, The Silken Cage, is then a significant aspect of “culture industry”, which aims to articulate the ‘eternal’ superiority of the Western race and the inferiority of other races. It is an order of discourse which legitimizes the Westerner’s sense of duty to ‘civilize’, ‘enlighten’, and ‘modernize’ the different cultural ‘Other’.