Conquering the Desert by Automobile: Modern Art and Colonial Era Press Coverage of the Moroccan Rally

French media coverage of the Moroccan Rally, a gruelling international auto race that traversed Europe and colonial Morocco, in the 1930s framed as both a sporting event and a spectacle of colonial dominance as the race allowed European drivers to symbolically and physically occupy Moroccan terrain. Through photomechanical imagery and narrative accounts, the French sports press celebrated the race as a heroic conquest, portraying Morocco as an exotic, empty landscape ripe for European adventure. These media portrayals are situated within broader discourses of early twentieth century visual culture, particularly Cubism and Futurism, that glorified speed, mechanization, and the colonial potential of modern transportation. Artists like Jean Metzinger and Filippo Marinetti explored the phenomenology of motion and duration, laying the conceptual groundwork for the press’s depiction of race car drivers as modern conquerors. The Moroccan Rally’s coverage functioned as a jingoistic articulation of colonial power, aligning avant-garde aesthetics with imperial ideology. The visual and rhetorical strategies used in the press reveal how 1930s motorsport became a medium through which colonial fantasies were projected and normalized in interwar French culture.