What Would the Sultan Think? Save the Legation
The Tangier American Legation – the only remaining witness to earliest days of American diplomacy in the Arab world – urgently needs restoration.
The Tangier American Legation – the only remaining witness to earliest days of American diplomacy in the Arab world – urgently needs restoration.
“Re-Mapping Tangier” gathered European, American, and Moroccan scholars at TALIM to discuss an inter-disciplinary approach to understanding the complex space that is Tangier: African, European, Atlantic, Mediterranean, International, Moroccan.
American Bruce Chalmers, aka Bruce Bourbon de Conde, aka Alfonso Yorba, aka Hajji Abdurrahman… once described by an American newspaper as “a new Lawrence of Arabia,” lived a life of a monarchist philatelic Arabist, and died in Tangier.
In an American historic house in Washington DC, home to DACOR, an association of US Foreign Service Officers, TALIM Director presents the Tangier American Legation, home of centuries of American diplomats in Morocco.
TALIM’s annual April Seminar 2013 had a decidedly strategic angle: the Strategic Dialogue between Morocco and the United States, one of the oldest diplomatic relationships for the US, sometimes strained – as recently over the UN role in the Moroccan Sahara – by regional political events.
American architect Cloe Erickson works to save Morocco’s vanishing rural heritage, often hidden in the high valleys of the Atlas Mountains.
Women artists from the Maghreb, part of the diaspora crisscrossing the Mediterranean, mix media and identity to create a “neo-Orientalist” school which challenges stereotypes and nationalisms of all sorts.
TALIM’s collection of digitized glass negatives provides rare glimpses of life in Tangier in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and here “Club Elixir” has metamorphosed into a lively – non-alcoholic – square.
Cut up though it might have been, last weekend’s Colloque à Tanger, devoted to Beats Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, succeeded in evoking that era when Tangier was the Interzone of politics and poetry.
Vanessa Paloma sings, writes, and lives for the music of her Sephardic forebears who left Morocco for the New World. Now she’s back in Morocco, one of the preeminent scholars – and performers – of Morocco’s Jewish musical heritage.