Making Visible the Invisible: George Orwell’s “Marrakech”

Much of the best literary journalism shows us what we do not and perhaps wish not to see. Nowhere is the mission of making visible those who are invisible articulated as explicitly as in George Orwell’s 1939 essay “Marrakech.” The colonial enterprise, Orwell tells us, is predicated on not seeing as fully human those whom we subjugate. If we did, we would have to reckon not only with their misery but with our complicity in their subjugation and misery. This chapter argues for the critical role of “Marrakech, " and literary journalism in general, in the shift from the ethnocentrism that underpins colonization abroad and domestic oppression at home, to recognition of our common humanity.