The Concept of Others and the Sense of Superiority in the Nineteenth Century English Travel Literature among the Arabs

Abstract

The word “others” is encompassed by Orientalism, it is a word behind

which numberless groups of Western travel writers lurk. These English

travelers, such as C.M. Doughty and R. Burton, had to encounter the people

overseas, who are called and evaluated as the “others”. A comprehensive

study about the concept of others is included in this paper. The reader may

follow the classical images of these “others” before he goes deeply into the

Victorian travelers’ reports

However, these travelers pronounced loudly their own superiority over

theses others- whether they were Arabs, Asians, Africans or black Americans.

Sometimes they are true in what they say about these others and most of the

time untrue, for it is their own concern to depict these others as inferior to

them. They show their readers that these others lack almost everything to the

extent that they don’t deserve the land they stand on. They, sometimes terrify

these others to control them. These others are sold and bought as goods. They,

according to the English Victorian, must be exterminated and suppressed.

The others are, in their eyes, brute. The last memento, the travelers left for

their coming European generations, is that the strength of the European ever

springs from the weakness of the others; the strength that should be used to

suppress those who sniff the air on Earth.