William S. Burroughs's image as a subversive avant-garde writer, uncompromisingly contesting all forms of social control, has shown remarkable staying power. A half-century after publication of Naked Lunch (1959), many critics would agree with Timothy S. Murphy that Burroughs's literary career is based upon a resistance to the totalitarian, system of modern capitalism and its ideological tool, state (Wising 4). It follows that Burroughs urges us to contest capitalist globalization, which Schneiderman and Walsh anthology Retaking Universe: William S. Burroughs in Age of Globalization (2004) models as a post-Cold War order of domination. Burroughs, we are told, well be more important than ever before in alerting us to realities of new global order and teaching us how to resist it (Russell 163), since his oppositional art ... challenge[s] standardized consciousness imposed by multinational corporate enterprise (McDaniel 134). David Banash, in his review of volume, does suggest that while Burroughs might be a bridge for media theorists to global, reader is left to wonder if this might not be a one-way street. One might well wish for a companion anthology of scholars with significant investments in global geography and history that Burroughs inhabited as an expatriate in Morocco, Mexico, South America, and Europe. Does Burroughs speak to such scholars as a resistant, liberatory intellectual? Yet Brian T. Edwards, a scholar with a significant investment in Morocco, concurs with Retaking Universe's assumptions. Although Burroughs may flirted with Orientalism (181), he writes, Naked Lunch ultimately refuses narrative coherence or authorial stability that pure American voice usually delivers. ... The breakdown of smooth rendering of speech is connected with Burroughs's antinational project and thus resists globalization, which relies on coherent difference and on maintenance of nation-states (181-82). This essay will take up Banash's suggestion that Burroughs's art may not be universally liberating, and read Naked Lunch and cut-up trilogy (The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express) against global geography and history. I put Burroughs's postmodern art in context of international tourism, which in late 1940s and 1950s was dominated by American money. Although he favored an off-the-beaten-track itinerary, Burroughs shared in mobility and buying power of postwar American middle class, and valorized destinations such as Mexico, where a single man lives high ... for $100 per month (Letters 63); Ecuador, where supposedly 2 ex-soldiers traveling with $2,000 now own large banana plantation, hacienda, live like kings (103); and Tangier, where one can have a room in best district for 50 per day (196). My purpose here is not simply to denounce Burroughs for playing imperialist Ugly American abroad, able to buy what and whoever he wants with his 'Yankee dollar' (Harris, Introduction xxviii). However, to borrow a term from Edward Said, I do want to emphasize that Burroughs's writing was worldly (World 35), in that he had specific ideological commitments that were bound up with touristic marketplace. Burroughs valorized libertarian freedom that he associated with vanished frontier of American West, and sought to recover this autonomy through a creative usage of leisure time outside America's borders. Accordingly, his fragmented narratives are not only influenced by Tristan Tzara and avant-garde of Paris, but by his status as a kind of subversive travel agent. Burroughs has gained respectability in American literary academy in large part through his work's anticipation of various concepts in poststructuralist thought, and his emphasis on cultural intermixture can even be said to anticipate postcolonial notions of hybridity. …