Conference Abstracts
17. Edwards, Brian; Northwestern University, USA:
"Following Casablanca: Recasting the Post-colonial City"
How do competing representations of the post-colonial
city reveal contrasting logics about urban space? How have dominant
U.S. political and economic projects for the Global South, in general,
and North Africa, in particular, emerged from ideas gleaned from
American representations of the North African city? In what ways
have post-colonial Moroccan filmmakers recast U.S. representations
of urban space, and what link might we seen between these meanings
made from the vantage of the post-colonial city and the post-colonial
redeployment of practices of looking?
In order to address this series of organizing questions,
this paper will look at the legacy of the 1942 Hollywood film Casablanca
in Moroccan cinema and juxtaposes U.S. and Moroccan cinematic representations
of Moroccan urban space. Although the hypercanonical Warner Bros.
film was named after and set in the major Moroccan city, the film’s
representation of what it called a “city of hope and despair”
was based more in Orientalist cinematic tradition than ethnographic
research. As such, Warner Bros. responded to a series of major film
representations of North African space that preceded it, particularly
Algiers (US, 1938) and the French classic Pépé le
Moko, as well as a minor film being made simultaneously on Warner
Bros.’ own lots: the remake of the colonialist film The Desert
Song, from which the Casablanca production borrowed stage sets.
The major Hollywood film thus participated in and extended French
colonial practices of understanding urban space, and has an entrenched
relationship to Orientalism as a technology of looking. The film,
completed and premiered in the immediate wake of the U.S. military
landings in North Africa in November 1942, also has a major place
in U.S. thinking about its newly discovered global reach and responsibilities.
“Casablanca” thus names the peculiar collusion of U.S.
cultural production and post-1942, post-colonial foreign relations,
a major and precise moment when U.S. texts become worldly in a new
way. It is, no less, a word that Warner Brothers thought they held
a copyright on and, in an extreme version of representation-as-ownership,
went so far as to claim as much in 1946 when the Marx Brothers were
filming A Night in Casablanca. Director Michael Curtiz’s representation
of Casablanca as a city at the empty center of an emerging American
globalismat the center of the city is a roulette wheel in Rick’s
multilingual Café Americain, where hypocrisy and double dealing
are the ethoscasts the city as a place of transit for foreigners,
and for Moroccans a place imagined in the temporal lag time familiar
from the colonialist tendency to commit Africans to the past of
the “primitive.” The latter is connected to the conservative
response to the immediate challenges of the film’s contemporary
American context. The complex yet readily apparent ways in which
Casablanca brackets or suppresses concerns of gender and race is
a way of distracting viewers from a more potent possibility repressed
by the film. Namely, that the African American Sam as a racialized
subject of U.S. colonialism might enter into a conversation with
the colonized Moroccan subjects who are relegated to the film’s
background. Both are placed in the temporal lag of “racial
time.”
Whatever its relationship to material or architectural
reality of the city of Casablanca, the Hollywood film has exerted
an interesting presence in postcolonial Moroccan cinema, one which
this paper follows. The paper thus employs a critical practice of
following the global flow of cultural production, an elaboration
of Arjun Appadurai’s conceptualization of the global movement
of ideoscapes, and motivated in part by the critical attempt to
disrupt the imperial logic at the center of Warner Bros.’
massively influential film. I offer a reading of two films by the
Moroccan filmmaker ‘Abd al-Qader Laqt‘a, al-Hubb fi
al-Dar al-Baida (Love in Casablanca, 1991) and the 1999 film Les
Casablancais, making reference as well to the Moroccan debate in
response to Laqt‘a’s controversial project. At the center
of Laqt‘a’s project is an exploration of the relationship
between cinematic space and urban space, and it is telling and important
that his 1991 film plays off of and reinterprets the 1942 Hollywood
film. In so doing, within a scene that I analyze, Laqt‘a recasts
the American representation of Casablanca (as occupying racial time
lag) and rewrites American culture itself as moribund precisely
because of the intertwined relationship of cinema to political culture.
That this original and trenchant critique emerges from the work
of a director whose vision of the urban space moves beyond the usual
dichotomy identified by the Urban Generations conference (namely
city as site of encounters, culture, citizenship vs. city as site
of misery, etc.) demonstrates an exciting vision at work. By examining
the urban space created within Laqt‘a’s cinematic vision,
and understanding it as a significant revision of Casablanca’
s vision of Casablanca, I argue that there is a rewriting or recasting
of dominant (neo)colonial logics about urban space. That this possibility
emerges in relation to the post-colonial city should also be seen
within the critical terms of globalization (of the Appadurai, Public
Culture school), for it suggests that the global flow of cultural
production is not a one-way street, and demonstrates how traveling
ideas and representations may be recast significantly in different
contexts.
Brief professional biography: Brian T. Edwards (Ph.D.
Yale) is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literary
Studies at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois (USA), where
he developed and is core faculty in the Ph.D. track in Postcolonial
and Diaspora Studies. Fields of interest include post-national American
studies, diaspora studies, colonial and postcolonial discourse,
translation, globalization studies, cultural anthropology, and film.
A former Fulbright Fellow to Morocco, he also researches Maghrebi
literature and culture, especially in its intersections with U.S.
culture and politics. He is an affiliate of the Moroccan Cultural
Studies Centre at Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdallah University in Fez,
where he has lectured and given seminars frequently over the past
decade. At Northwestern, he has taught graduate seminars on topics
such as comparative orientalisms; globalization, diaspora, and culture;
cultures of circulation; post-national American studies. Edwards
has published articles on Edith Wharton, Paul Bowles, Frantz Fanon,
Mohammed Mrabet, the encounter of American Studies and postcolonial
studies, the role of individual intelligence in globalization, and
1950s Hollywood Orientalism. He has recently completed a book entitled
Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca
to the Marrakech Express (forthcoming in 2005 from Duke University
Press), and is currently editing a collection entitled Globalizing
American Studies, based on a conference he organized at Northwestern
in spring 2004.
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