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Reviewed by:
  • Morocco Bound: Disorienting America's Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express
  • Allen Hibbard (bio)
Morocco Bound: Disorienting America's Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express. By Brian T. Edwards. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. xii +376 pp., with 27 illustrations. $23.95.

Brian Edwards's title, with its elegant pun, is taken from the 1942 film Road to Morocco, starring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby: "Like Webster's dictionary we're Morocco bound." A sign reading "Road to Morocco" in English, left to right, and "tariq al-Marraksh" in Arabic, right to left, becomes a figure for the kinds of disjunctions and interplay between languages and cultures that Edwards explores, as does the film itself, shot in California's Imperial Valley virtually contemporaneous with the landing of US troops in the real geography of North Africa. At the same time American soldiers, travelers, writers, and anthropologists are bound for Morocco, their perceptions are often bound by preconceived Orientalist notions of the region. Probing, timely, and richly suggestive, Edwards's study of the dynamics and select encounters between the Maghreb and the US from the early 1940s to the early 1970s presents familiar materials through different lenses and enlarges the frame to include portions of the Moroccan archive that have largely remained unknown and unexamined by US scholars. The abundance of [End Page 214] rich material makes the Maghreb an especially fitting focus. Of particular interest to Edwards is the often vexed connection between representations of the Maghreb and foreign policy. Admitting that an "institutional chasm" exists between academic work and the State Department, Edwards notes that we must attend to the chasm itself, "how it is constructed, how it operates, how it organizes reading practices, and how current reading practices leave it undisturbed" (10). By attending to broader historical and cultural contexts and by becoming more aware of patterns of circulation, we might, as Edwards proposes, be in a better position "to rethink the role of American culture in the world and imagine alternative possibilities for an American encounter with the world" (11).

Edwards takes as his starting point Henry Luce's proclamation in Life magazine in 1942 that the twentieth century would be "the American century," and proceeds to examine how "after U.S. entry into a geopolitical space of ascendancy, representations of the world or the foreign played a special role in rethinking the meaning of American national identity" (4). Moving beyond the scope of Edward Said's Orientalism (which concentrated primarily on European interactions with the Orient in the nineteenth century), Edwards considers the "benevolent" global hegemony maintained by the United States "in a global context in which the United States is deeply present as a liberating alternative and, simultaneously, as a new form of domination," a dominion created and maintained in large measure through the widespread dissemination of film, media, and other forms of popular culture (72).

"Taking Casablanca," the first section of Edwards's study, treats the virtually simultaneous events of the landing of US troops in Morocco and the release of the classic film Casablanca in 1942. In each case, encounters with North Africa were profoundly shaped by pre-existing notions of the place, often viewed through the filter of French colonialism and Orientalist attitudes, or made more comprehensible by setting them within well-known narratives such as those involving the American frontier. Material from General Patton's papers, Ernie Pyle's journalistic accounts, and reports of the North African campaign in the African-American press buttresses Edwards's argument. One key foreign policy dilemma emerging from the discussion concerns the negotiation of pressures to support the French colonial structures and countervailing arguments in support of indigenous Moroccan nationalist movements. The United States ultimately, in the interest of maintaining political stability, tacitly endorsed French policies. At the Roosevelt-Churchill Casablanca Conference in January of 1943, Roosevelt (who met with de Gaulle and Churchill) reportedly told Mohammad V, "given the effort which Morocco—in so far as it is a protectorate—has agreed [End Page 215] to give to defend the cause of peace, I can assure you that ten years from now your country will be independent" (42...

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