Sheltering Screens: Paul Bowles and Foreign Relations

1. Interrupting the American Archive

When Paul Bowles died in Tangier on 18 November 1999, the story was covered widely in the US press. US obituaries portrayed Bowles, with remarkable consistency, as an American expatriate connected, in spite of self-imposed exile in North Africa, to many of the most intriguing writers and artists of Euro-American Modernism. The omissions in the portrait—especially the importance of Bowles's Maghrebi context—are endemic to a narrow conceptualization of the author's career and indicate the resistance to thinking about US literary and cultural production in its global context. After 1941, provoked by a more immediate and massive engagement in global affairs, Americans reorganized their thinking about the foreign. From the late 1940s through the 1970s, Bowles played a significant part in imagining the relationship of Americans to the foreign in general and to Europe's former colonies in particular. Bowles's career challenged the circumscribed sense of what counts as American literature as well as the perceived chasm separating cultural production from international politics. His residence in Tangier, beginning in 1947, corresponds with a deep involvement in Moroccan affairs by the US government during which Bowles wrote frequently about North African politics and culture. After Morocco attained independence in 1956, Bowles was the most prominent US citizen living in Morocco, someone whose statements were widely circulated and frequently disparaged by Moroccans. His work was not free of its own limitations, nor were his politics liberating. But his writing emerged from a crucial moment before US supremacist attitudes were consolidated. Most US accounts of Bowles have perpetuated the Cold War tendency to translate the foreign within the logic of exceptionalism. Yet Bowles himself had long since taken a path diverging from such a nationalist or even nation-based logic.

Since 9/11, Bowles's name has reemerged in the US media as a prescient and missed American writer.¹ With the posthumous publication of a major collection in late 2001 and a two-volume Library of America edition of his works in 2002, Bowles's place in the American canon seems yet more assured because of an implicit connection of recent history with his alleged "prediction" of a world gone terribly wrong in the encounter of Americans and Arabs.² Despite a shelf of biographies and studies, however, the scholarly record reflects little more than a smattering of information on his longtime Moroccan artistic collaborators, friends, and lovers.³ The absence of such material may encourage critics merely to spin the established version of Bowles's career—a writer separated by a Modernist scrim from engagement with his geopolitical context—and discourage others from seeing Bowles as deeply involved in the complex interplay of cultural and geopolitical concerns that animated the US presence in the region.⁴

If there is to be a twenty-first century rediscovery of Bowles, the pedagogical and critical danger is that readers will continue to view him through the Cold War lenses that focused his earlier reception. Namely, having long repressed the question of empire that lies at the foundation of American studies approaches to reading literature, when readers reread Bowles in the context of US empire, it will be difficult to evade what Paul Giles has derided as "the magic circle between text and context" (263). Critical readings of Bowles that simply extrapolate his texts as Orientalist are caught within a similar circle. This essay is interested in interrupting those frames by offering a Moroccan archive on Bowles's Moroccan context and by attending to the various forms of disruption that Bowles's work includes and produces. One strand emerging from the Moroccan archive seems toaffirm—and extend—what has been called a "postnational" approach, namely one that sees the nation form and the related question of national literature as elaborate and influential but also historically delimited constructions. In the US, those constructions reemerge with new ferocity in the early Cold War, during which Bowles...