Writing Tangier discusses an array of topics relating to the literature on Tangier from the
seventeenth century to the present. Major questions include: Why has Tangier come to play an
important role in contemporary world literary history as a signifier in the literary
imagination what is the nature of the inter-textual output produced through Paul Bowles'
translations of the oral tales of a circle of uneducated storytellers (including Mohammed
Mrabet and Larbi Layachi) and the text (For Bread Alone) brought to Bowles by the literate
Mohamed Choukri how do academics artists and writers who have been based in the city or who
have written about it assess the various socio-economic political and cultural factors that
have shaped its cultural production and the relationship of this production to the celebrated
hybrid aspects of its identity does the success of the literature of Tangier reflect a truly
new multicultural cosmopolitanism or does it stem from the fact that this literature is
congenial to Westerners that it is understood in terms that they themselves define and that
much of it (including productions in Arabic prepared with the expectation of translation) has
even been «written to measure» for them?
