Cirrus@Austlit

'This article puts geography back into the frame in its consideration of the travel texts of two gay authors and public intellectuals, André Gide (1869–1951) and Robert Dessaix (b. 1944). Gide undertook formative trips to the Maghreb from the 1890s onwards, and Dessaix, while not his first visit to the region, retraces Gide’s itineraries in the 2000s. Mary Louise Pratt, in her essay “Mapping Ideology” (1981), speaks of the “Voyage South” to describe those narratives that “involve the discovery of a false Utopia, where a cornucopia of Europe’s forbidden fruits – illicit sex, crime, sloth, irrationality, sensuality, excessive power, cruelty, lost childhood – is offered up to the questing hero”. I explore the ways Gide and Dessaix frame and interrogate travel to and around the Maghreb according to some of these terms, and shed light on their engagement with this region as a means of affirming their identity as gay men. Since Dessaix appropriates an essentially colonial author, Gide, in a supposedly postcolonial age, I also examine key questions Dessaix raises about travel and sexuality in the modern-day Maghreb.' (Publication abstract)