Performing Tangier 2008: Borders, Beats & Beyond

The fourth international Tangier conference will focus on the city as a site of transcultural encounters in art, literature, music, and politics in all periods up through the present and projecting into the future. We especially invite papers and panel...

The fourth international Tangier conference will focus on the city as a site of transcultural encounters in art, literature, music, and politics in all periods up through the present and projecting into the future. We especially invite papers and panels to investigate the dynamics of the city’s cultural, spatial, and performative interactions, past, present, and future, including issues of change, confrontation, and alterity. We also invite a continuation of panels and discussions begun in previous conferences—following the methods and techniques of Juan Goytisolo as well as Andrew Hussey’s creative deconstruction of the urban morphology of Paris—of how Tangier might be re-invented as one of the World capitals of the twenty-first century. In broad historical terms we invite continuing evaluation of specific writers and artists who have come to or out of Tangier, from Tahar Ben Jelloun, Mohamed Choukri, Mohammed Azeddine Tazi, Ahmed Beroho, Souad Bahechar, Moumen Smihi, Farida Benlyazid, Anouar Majid, Jillali Farhati, Zobeir Ben Bouchta, to Mohammed Mrabet and including the oral tradition some of whose storytellers and artists who were translated by Paul Bowles, as well as modernist painters like Matisse, existentialist writers such as Bowles, dramatists of various stripes such as Jean Genet and the brilliant minimalist Samuel Beckett, “Beats” such as Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsburg, and others, as well as more general movements associated with the various African, Andalusian or Islamic influences on western music in general and more particularly on American jazz and blues like the outstanding collaborations of Dar Gnawa in Tangier with Jazz legend Randy Weston. Our perspectives and horizons are all-inclusive.

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