Extra-ordinary Tangier: Domesticating practices in a border zone

In this article, we take to task the representation of Tangier as an exceptional, extra-ordinary city, not bound by the usual laws of time and space—a representation conjured up by its literary expats in the early 1950s and still persistent today. We attempt to confront it with a different set of geographical imaginations of what we term, in shorthand, a domesticated more-than-ordinary city. In today’s Tangier, notions of exceptionality continue to dominate both touristic and artistic and literary imaginaries, as well as institutional narratives seeking to promote the city as an open space for trade and economic opportunity. We counter such accounts with a set of other geographical imaginations of Tangier, in literary and biographical accounts and artistic practice, a kaleidoscopic view on the city that refracts and reflects vantage and practice points of Tangier as both more than and extremely ordinary. Although Tangier is in many ways a unique case and setting, the points we try to raise here hold valence in other contexts, and we believe can help illuminate some continuing (post)colonial representational habits, cultural as well as geopolitical.