Topping Sexual Tourism: Colonial Desire in America's Tangier

Colonial Affairs: Bowles, Burroughs, and Chester Write Tangier. Greg A. Mullins. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. xiii + 164 pp.

A recent entry in what looks like an emergent field of queer colonial studies, Colonial Affairs explores colonialism and sexuality in Tangier via the work of three gay male American expatriate writers and three multilingual Moroccan artists, one writer and two oral storytellers, who made their living as prostitutes in Tangier's tourist trade. Contending that the American texts betray the influence of orientalist racial stereotypes and what Greg A. Mullins calls "colonial nostalgia," Colonial Affairs attempts to stage an encounter between different cases of the marginal in order to multiply the "representations of sex, sexuality, identity and desire in Tangier" (14). Mullins argues that "interzone literature," the English-language literature from the late 1930s to 1956, when Morocco reclaimed Tangier from two centuries of international control, calls into question the standard narratives of national and sexual identity by revealing the extent to which colonial desire and sexuality are mutually structuring (3). The book's original contribution lies in its exploration of the little-known writer Alfred Chester, whom Mullins places in the same company as the celebrated figures Paul Bowles and William Burroughs. That a gay-male expatriate literature foregrounding the dissolution of the subject can be read as an allegory of the violence of American postwar culture interestingly challenges a version of American studies "from the center."

In very brief chapters Colonial Affairs attempts to tie together sex, nation, language, and writing by analyzing desire along lines now familiar in queer studies. What it adds for our consideration is the bold claim that escape from the United States may be the most enabling condition of life and creativity, and perhaps not only for a handful of eccentrics in the postwar period. Oddly, Colonial Affairs misses opportunities to explore literary ironies that might amplify its interpretations of colonial desire. A quick example illustrates this point. The hilarity and cruel irony of Bowles's story "The Time of Friendship" never emerges in Mullins's analysis because he is intent on reading the tale as an allegory of loss rather than as a parody of the passion for such loss or a critique of the compulsion to stake one's uniqueness on the melancholy of history. In the tale, a Swiss German schoolteacher, fond of holidaying in exotic French-occupied Algeria, regrets the loss of her favorite oasis, now declared off-limits by the French army in its effort to quell the Algerian revolution. Yet Bowles is content neither with historical portrayal nor with his shrewd sketch of exoticizing desire. In a scene that might rank as the most hysterical in all of his cool, sinister fiction, Bowles has the starving Algerian teenage boy, the object of Fräulein Windling's laborious romantic pickup, respond to a lesson in Christianity by unwrapping and eating the entire chocolate cast of the Christmas nativity scene, along with the oranges that had served as ornaments, that had been elaborately gathered as props for the schoolteacher to employ in her civilizing mission. The story might be used to distinguish the kinds of alterity that are at issue in Colonial Affairs by allowing a distinction between the Western habit of racializing difference and the Maghrebin notion of religious or gender difference as the guarantor of identity; instead, the category of race circulates unspecified and incoherently under other terms like nation or colonization. This happens also in the book's assumption that the American racial stereotype of "Arabness" and the Moroccan stereotype of the "Nazarene" are equivalent and mutually constitutive, when in fact the one is the product of a racial culture and the other the product of a colonized culture.

An all-too-brief invocation of gender melancholia orients the book's insight that colonial racism, like homophobia, may...