المستخلص: |
This paper addresses the “mobility” issue by proposing to revisit the profile of a European icon of mobility, namely the flâneur. Although this figure pertains to nineteenth-century French literature, it enables a specific angle on the subject of mobility in relation to Paul Bowles’s contribution to the genre of contemporary travel literature. My study investigates the possibility of transposing this literary archetype of the flâneur from its European context to a transcultural one in colonial and postcolonial North Africa. While exploring the topic of mobility from this perspective, I argue that the concept of the flâneur goes beyond the spatio-temporal paradigm of the peripatetic leisure experience as undertaken by a number of bourgeois nineteenth century artistic figures in Paris. I start from the premise that in the shift towards a broader meaning of flânerie, the status of the aimless stroller grows into a complex intellectual posture and a claimed identity. Through focus on Bowles’s affinity with the flâneur’s portrait, I also argue that this modern concept can be extended so as to encompass the experience of an expatriate belated travel writer pursuing a spatial and situational writing of the crowd/ the city, but also of the self simultaneously, through being off to distant parts.
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