The Representation of Tangiers in Literature and Film The city of Tangiers in Northern Morocco occupies a particular space in the country’s cultural and historical memory. As an undeniable crossroads between Africa and Europe, the city has emerged as an enticing muse that inspires creators to dwell in the realm of imagination to capture its complex historical, social and cultural fabric. As a historic site, Tangiers has been a central trope in the elaboration of various narratives celebrating the contribution of Muslims to world civilization; the world traveler Ibn Batouta’s narrative started from his native city of Tangiers in the 14th century. Tariq Ibn Ziad’s crossing to the Iberian Peninsula also inscribed the name of Tangiers in historical manuals. Tangiers is infused with the collective memory of resistance to Spanish and French colonialism. With the flow of financial capital aimed at industrializing the Northern ‘jewel’ of Morocco, social fragmentation threatens the central government’s attempts to silence political dissent. Tangiers’ proximity to Europe has attracted migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa and their movement has generated tensions between Morocco and neighboring European nations, especially Spain. In the 1970s, authors such as Mohamed Choukri and Paul Bowles saw in Tangiers a metropolitan center, a cultural hub, and a zone of conflicting interests. In the twenty-first century, filmmakers have strived to remap the complex spatial organization of a city subject to the nation-state’s national integration policies. Through a critical reading of the autobiographical novel of the acclaimed Moroccan writer and Nobel nominee Mohamed Choukri For Bread Alone (Arabic: Al-khubz al-hafi, 1972) and Rachid Benhadj’s film of the same name (2005), I posit that in both works Tangiers is framed as entrapped in the political economy of globalization. Frederic Jameson’s concept of “cognitive mapping”/”class consciousness” helps elucidate the social dynamics that characterize evolving metropolitan centers. The narrative constructions of urban outcasts lacking the power to negotiate the city’s seductions and dangers lay the foundation for a new cinema reflecting Baudrillard’s claim that today “the real and the imaginary are confused in the same operational totality.” As a crossroads of multiple cultures throughout the centuries, Tangiers engenders the complexity of a metropolis that is in a continuous process of reinventing itself. I will show that the city’s identity is never fixed, but permeated by tensions, ambiguities, and ambivalences.