During the last eighteen years of his life (1968-86), Jean Genet was preoccupied with the struggles of the disenfranchised and displaced: among them, the Black Panthers, the Baader-Meinhof, and the Palestinians. Hadrien Laroche's book is a careful...

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?

An edge city, poised at the northernmost tip of Africa but just nine miles from Europe, Tangier is more than a destination, it is an escape. The Interzone, as William Burroughs called it, has attracted spies, outlaws, outcasts and writers for centuries – men and women breaking through artistic borders. The results were some of the most incendiary and influential books of our time and the list of outlaw originals is long, stretching from Ibn Battuta and Alexandre Dumas to Twain and Wharton and from the darkly brilliant Beats of Bowles, Kerouac, Gysin and Ginsberg to the great Moroccan novelists: Mohamed Choukri, Mohammed Mrabet and Tahar Ben Jelloun.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction, which focuses on Morocco's history, provides a helpful synopsis of the kingdom, and is supplemented with a useful chronology of major events. Hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on former rulers, current leaders, ancient capitals, significant locations, influential institutions, and crucial aspects of the economy, society, culture and religion form the core of the book. A bibliography of sources is included to promote further more specialized study.

How Moroccan society, especially in the city of Tangier, has been affected by the flows of migrants from both West Africa and Europe Since the early 1990s, new migratory patterns have been emerging in the southern Mediterranean. Here, a large number of West Africans and young Moroccans, including minors, make daily attempts to cross to Europe. The Moroccan city of Tangier, because of its proximity to Spain, is one of the main gateways for this migratory movement. It has also become a magnet for middle- and working-class Europeans seeking a more comfortable life. Based on extensive fieldwork, Living Tangier examines the dynamics of transnational migration in a major city of the Global South and studies African "illegal" migration to Europe and European "legal" migration to Morocco, looking at the itineraries of Europeans, West Africans, and Moroccan children and youth, their strategies for crossing, their motivations, their dreams, their hopes, and their everyday experiences. In the process, Abdelmajid Hannoum examines how Moroccan society has been affected by the flows of migrants from both West Africa and Europe, focusing on race relations and analyzing issues related to citizenship and social inequality. Living Tangier considers what makes the city one of the most attractive for migrants preparing to cross to Europe and illustrates not only how migrants live in the city but also how they live the city—how they experience it, encounter its people, and engage its culture, walk its streets, and participate in its events. Reflecting on his own experiences and drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Edward Said, Tayeb Saleh, Amin Maalouf, and Dany Laferrière, Hannoum provokes new questions in order to reconfigure migration as a postcolonial phenomenon and interrogate how Moroccan society responds to new cultural processes.