Hassan Bourara

Paul Bowles: an "Invisible Spectator"? Hassan Bourara

This study of Paul Bowles?s North African writings, especially those concerned with Morocco, investigates the possibilities and limitations that accrued from the writer's carefully maintained reputation as both a traveler (a translator of the ?exotic?) and as exile. The book offsets claims (by critics by Paul Bowles himself) to a putative freedom from national, cultural, or religious loyalties and challenges his status as "expert" on Muslim North African countries. Bowles's North African writings are embedded in an imperialist discursive tradition and the "authority" of his textual representations feeds on the tropes of detachment and "invisibility" empowered and fostered by the myth of exile and/or expatriation. Bowles became regarded as such an authority that his travel and journalistic writings were literally assigned as "missions." The financial comfort allowed by publishers' advances did not go without its concomitant share of political "contamination," especially since, at the time, the North African countries were engaged in their independence wars...