Paul Bowles S Literary Engagement With Morocco

Many American writers visited Morocco. Paul Bowles ended up living there for fifty-two years. This book looks at how Bowles’s preoccupation with Moroccan customs, specifically “meditations and a state of being ‘in-between’” permeated his work.

Many American writers visited Morocco. Paul Bowles ended up living there for fifty-two years. This book looks at how Bowles's preoccupation with Moroccan customs, specifically "meditations and a state of being 'in-between'" permeated his work.

Shows that the writings of Paul Bowles, who is often seen as a literary renegade, owe much to the antinomian American tradition of Emerson and his literary descendants.

Global Identities in Transit: The Ethics and Politics of Representation in World Literatures and Cultures explores the myriad aspects of identity formation and identity representation in an increasingly globalized world. Covering a variety of cultural and historical experiences in addition to several texts of world literatures, the contributors discuss the configurations of transnationality and transculturality in our postcolonial and globalized world. Acknowledging that nationality, ethnicity, gender, and class are continually shaped by historical processes, the contributors hone in on the ways that the increase in mobility via migration, diaspora, and exile render identities always in transit In the face of structural inequalities and social injustices predominant in this context, the chapters reflect on the moral obligations of representation. This collection will be of interest to scholars of cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and world literature.

In this intense and brilliant book Bowles focuses on Morocco, condensing expreience, emotion, and the whole history of a people into a series of short, insightful vignettes. He distills for us the very essence of Moroccan culture. With extraordinary immediacy, he takes the reader on a journey through the Moroccan centuries, pausing at points along the way to create resonant images of the country, it's landscapes, and the beliefs and characteristics of its inhabitants.

Until attention shifted to the Middle East in the early 1970s, Americans turned most often toward the Maghreb—Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and the Sahara—for their understanding of “the Arab.” In Morocco Bound, Brian T. Edwards examines American representations of the Maghreb during three pivotal decades—from 1942, when the United States entered the North African campaign of World War II, through 1973. He reveals how American film and literary, historical, journalistic, and anthropological accounts of the region imagined the role of the United States in a world it seemed to dominate at the same time that they displaced domestic social concerns—particularly about race relations—onto an “exotic” North Africa. Edwards reads a broad range of texts to recuperate the disorienting possibilities for rethinking American empire. Examining work by William Burroughs, Jane Bowles, Ernie Pyle, A. J. Liebling, Jane Kramer, Alfred Hitchcock, Clifford Geertz, James Michener, Ornette Coleman, General George S. Patton, and others, he puts American texts in conversation with an archive of Maghrebi responses. Whether considering Warner Brothers’ marketing of the movie Casablanca in 1942, journalistic representations of Tangier as a city of excess and queerness, Paul Bowles’s collaboration with the Moroccan artist Mohammed Mrabet, the hippie communities in and around Marrakech in the 1960s and early 1970s, or the writings of young American anthropologists working nearby at the same time, Edwards illuminates the circulation of American texts, their relationship to Maghrebi history, and the ways they might be read so as to reimagine the role of American culture in the world.

This book offers a unique exploration of the work of Paul Bowles and Ibrahim Alkoni, and reveals timely insights into the relationship between the West and the Orient, showing that they both challenge and extend existing scholarship on this subject. It builds on a sound theoretical platform which serves as a solid foundation for the analysis of the overarching theme. Theories of place, representation, Orientalism and post-colonialism are discussed in depth and are linked to the deconstruction and analysis of the selected literary texts, helping the reader understand the various quests and motivations of the protagonists of the works of Bowles and Alkoni. The first part of the book looks into the work of Bowles, and is based on the fact that many of the author’s texts revolve around the theme of encounters between Western and Eastern cultures. It adopts a specific focus on the North African space, which is depicted from a number of different points of view, including native, French, English and American perspectives. The second section discusses the work of the Libyan author Ibrahim Alkoni as a quester for a Mythical Identity. It introduces the reader to the significance of the desert in both classical and modern Arabic literature and its place in the Arabic cultural imaginary. This work is highly original both in its approach and subject matter, and, as such, it constitutes a valuable contribution to the study of comparative literature, Arabic literature, and postcolonial magical realist literature. It offers many original insights into this little studied field, demonstrating a successful venture into less-trodden terrain.