Reclaiming Tangier: Mohammed Choukri’s Al-Khubz al-Ḥāfī and Subaltern Citizenship in Urban Literature

This article examines Choukri’s Al-Khubz al-Ḥāfī in relation to the widely circulated Euro-American geo-literary imaginary of cosmopolitan Tangier. The paper highlights the political expediency of the Arabic text showing how Choukri challenges the rhetorical violence of silencing the Moroccans in European and American accounts by casting them in roles of natives/ Muslims outside discourses of citizenship in the modern city. Most fully, the following analysis illustrates how Choukri uses realist representation to engage with the city’s spheres of monetary circulation and social indifference to unsettle totalizing representations of Tangier’s cosmopolitanism. Finally, the paper reexamines dismissive Arab critics’ reception of the text, arguing for the necessity of reimagining it in relation to discourses of the modern city.