Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express (New Americanists) [Paperback]

Brian T. Edwards (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0822336448 | ISBN-13: 978-0822336440 | Publication Date: November 1, 2005

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Morocco Bound is a powerful meditation on the question of why the circulation of cultural representations matters…. Given its important critical interventions, Morocco Bound should be a required text for a broad range of readers and scholars in the fields of American studies, postcolonialism, comparative literature, and Middle Eastern Studies.” - Ali Behdad, Comparative Literature

"Throughout this book it is clear that Edwards views dialogue as a modest corrective to Orientalist tendencies, often pointing out moments when opportunities for exchange were missed. Edwards’s own work is consciously collaborative and dialogic; he acknowledges his debt to Moroccan colleagues. His own experiences in Morocco, the ground on which this book is built, constitutes yet another chapter in the American-Moroccan encounter at an historical moment when the need for dialogue and conversation across the gaping chasm separating the United States and the Arab world is as dire as ever." - Allen Hibbard, Comparative Literature Studies

"Not only does Edwards’s book propose a methodology that importantly indicates the material differences between text and context, but it also breaks new scholarly ground in presenting a new area of study for transnational American studies: the orientalist construction of the Maghreb. In doing so, Morocco Bound represents a timely intervention into the epistemological and material violence of the present moment and promises to be a study that will be returned to long after the present conflict (hopefully) has passed." - Christopher Breu, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East

"Morocco Bound is an exemplary work of postcolonial American studies scholarship, one acutely sensitive to the importance of the specificities of colonial and imperial relations in the Maghreb. Yet Morocco Bound is no predictable ideological study. Edwards constantly foregrounds the historical complexities of encounter in each text he analyzes while simultaneously presenting nuanced close readings. In the process, he challenges familiar theoretical paradigms and presents us with new possibilities." - Malini Johar Schueller, American Quarterly

“Morocco Bound announces a radical departure from contemporary debates on orientalism through an interesting deployment of the concept of circulation in its study of the U.S. encounter with North Africa and through an astute consideration of the ways that American texts translate the North African Arab and Berber other. With this book, postcolonialism, cultural studies, African studies, and American studies will be refreshed and can begin some of the most exciting debates anew.”—Taieb Belghazi, Mohammed V University, Rabat, Morocco

“By his commitment to working across languages, treating several disciplines and diverse cultural levels (official, mass, avant-garde), and by his disruptive practice of reading Arabic voices together with Anglophones, Brian Edwards has produced an exemplary performance of what American Studies must become in the twenty-first century.”—Jonathan Arac, author of The Emergence of American Literary Narrative, 1820–1860

"As literary studies in the United States founder between America globalizing and the globe Americanizing, Brian T. Edwards's brilliant analysis of how America becomes worldly for others is a model for future work. Here language-based close readings bring literary criticism and the study of cultural politics together as the author guides us with a sure hand from cold war ideology, through 'hippie orientalism' and postcoloniality, onto the threshold of the consequences of globalization seen in a new perspective."—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

From the Publisher

"As literary studies in the United States founder between America globalizing and the globe Americanizing, Brian T. Edwards’s brilliant analysis of how America becomes worldly for others is a model for future work. Here language-based close readings bring literary criticism and the study of cultural politics together as the author guides us with a sure hand from cold war ideology, through ‘hippie orientalism’ and postcoloniality, onto the threshold of the consequences of globalization seen in a new perspective."—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

"Morocco Bound announces a radical departure from contemporary debates on orientalism through an interesting deployment of the concept of circulation in its study of the U.S. encounter with North Africa and through an astute consideration of the ways that American texts translate the North African Arab and Berber other. With this book, postcolonialism, cultural studies, African studies, and American studies will be refreshed and can begin some of the most exciting debates anew."—Taieb Belghazi, Mohammed V University, Rabat, Morocco

"By his commitment to working across languages, treating several disciplines and diverse cultural levels (official, mass, avant-garde), and by his disruptive practice of reading Arabic voices together with Anglophones, Brian Edwards has produced an exemplary performance of what American Studies must become in the twenty-first century."—Jonathan Arac, author of The Emergence of American Literary Narrative, 1820–1860 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 376 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books (November 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822336448
• ISBN-13: 978-0822336440
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,523,435 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Brian T. Edwards teaches at Northwestern University, where he is an associate professor of English, comparative literary studies, American studies, and Asian and Middle East studies. He studied at Yale University, where he earned his B.A. in English (1990) and Ph.D. in American Studies (1998). Edwards has lectured extensively in the U.S. and abroad, including in Egypt, India, Iran, Lebanon, Morocco, and Tunisia, and has been visiting faculty at the University of Tehran and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is a former Fulbright Fellow to Morocco and (in 2009) a Fulbright Senior Specialist at Cairo University. He has been awarded major fellowships from the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Edwards writes about American literature and culture in its international context, and contemporary culture of North Africa and the Middle East - especially Morocco, Egypt, and Iran, where he travels frequently - in the complex conditions that have emerged after the so-called American century. In addition to his books Morocco Bound and Globalizing American Studies, he has published essays on Henry James, Edith Wharton, Paul Bowles, Alfred Hitchcock, Frantz Fanon, Mohammed Mrabet, the encounter of American Studies and postcolonial studies, contemporary Moroccan cinema, American Studies in Iran, and other topics. His creative non-fiction appears in literary journals such as The Believer, McSweeney's, and A Public Space. In 2009, he guest-edited a special portfolio for A Public Space on new Egyptian writing, which included new translations of Cairo-based writers and artists whom he calls "Cairo 2010: After Kefaya."

Edwards is working on two new books. The first, entitled After the American Century, examines the circulation of American culture and its forms in contemporary North Africa and the Middle East, with particular focus on three cities - Fez, Cairo, and Tehran - in order to make an argument about the circulation of culture in the digital age counter to prevailing notions in both literary studies and public and cultural diplomacy. The second, entitled Kiddie Orientalism, emerges from his literary non-fiction, and weaves together two seemingly disparate strands. How to describe the contemporary Middle East and North Africa in ways unbeholden to generations of racist stereotypes and politically charged misperceptions? And how American parents now in their thirties and forties might describe for their young children the paradoxes of the world they are growing up in even while trying to re-craft our own relationship to that world?