4. Nocturnal Traces and Voyaging Critique: From Shahrazad to Said

Abstract

Perhaps there is no narrative that can better accommodate the desire of Western mainstream readers to unveil and penetrate the hidden worlds, bodies, and minds of Arabs than The Arabian Nights. If Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote is the Andalusian mother of the modern European novel, Alf Layla wa Layla, known in English as One Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights, is truly its Arabic grandmother. By 1908, Martha Pike Conant had already dubbed the assemblage of parables, fables, and stories “the fairy godmother of the English novel.” Given the enthusiastic exoticism almost intrinsically linked to the long history of selective receptions, tendentious translations, and literary assimilations of the Nights in the West, some might be surprised to find its transgeneric mode of spinning stories within stories at work in the formation and transformation of Anglophone Arab representations. Sure, the strategy of firmly inserting Arab representations into the lasting and, by now, transnational narrative tradition running from Antoine Galland’s twelve-volume transference, Les mille et une nuits (1704–1708), to the latest adaptations by Hollywood and the tourism industry or the net spheres of video and platform games perfectly makes sense for works that are meant to reach a global audience by way of Orientalizing themselves. But the seemingly well-established functional route of self-marketing can hardly be adapted (at least not in an unbroken way) in those representations in which I am predominantly interested here: representations that, although they do not necessarily explicitly counter dominant perceptions of Arabs, often desperately struggle to emancipate themselves from the globalized Orientalist archive and its truth effects. However, if we consider not only the Nights’s almost unrivaled place in what we are used to calling world literature but also keep in mind this work’s profound influence on the global production of Orientalist theater, opera, music, painting, architecture, and popular