Until attention shifted to the Middle East in the early 1970s, Americans turned most often toward the Maghreb--Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and much of 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.
Brian T. Edwards is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University.
Industry Reviews
"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,' postcoloniality--onto the threshold of the consequences of globalization seen in a new perspective."--Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University "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 achieved 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 T. 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 "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 "Brian T. Edwards has penned a fundamental book, one that takes an in-depth look at how America--via both popular culture and the State Department--"discovered" Morocco, starting with Paul Bowles, moving through Casablanca, and ending with hippies, hashish, and 'happenings.'"--Rebecca Romani, Al Jadid "Brian T. Edwards applies the lesson's of Edward Said's Orientalism...to an arena whose time has come...It is easy to endorse his collaborative spirit and to join in lamenting what he calls the American heritage of indifference toward the political travails of Moroccans." --Diana Wylie , American Historical Review
