How does Paul Bowles's literary engagement with Morocco resonate for audiences today? How does his interstitial space reorient the audience’s critical energies and redirect its gaze outward to question the future of Bowles studies in light of contemporary tensions between The West and Muslim societies? By raising these and other questions, this lecture settles for an unsettled state in reading Bowles's writings on Morocco, by highlighting the complexities and realities of the cross-cultural encounters involving Moroccan and American cultures as they re-emerge in and through Bowles’s writings. The aim of this lecture is twofold. On the one hand, this lecture seeks to illuminate the relationship Paul Bowles had with Morocco as a translator, an autobiographer, a short-story writer, a novelist and above all, as a traveller-flâneur. On the other hand, it hopes to highlight the way Bowles’s geographical and poetic journey have helped audiences situate the American writer at the Liminal threshold where allegiances and alienations, Western and Muslim societies, are tied together through the mediation of this North African gateway. This lecture explores Paul Bowles's writings as the textual and cross-cultural contexts of American/Moroccan encounters. It also hopes to highlight some of the ways in which Bowles's re-presentations of identity reopen the frontier as a Liminal space, between U.S.A and Morocco, with unusual complexity and distinctiveness.
