In Defense of the Imagination: The Historical Reciprocity of Shahrazad and Modern Storytelling in Arabic Literature

Abstract

By reference to The Thousand and One Nights, this dissertation limns a genealogy on the imagination, in Orientalism, as a site of struggle over meanings of change and transformation. This genealogy emerges with the translation of The Nights by the French translator Antoine Galland (1646-1715), who incorporates the text into Western modes of production that value unity and mimesis. This happens through his introduction of a narrative closure to the Arabic manuscript in which he transforms Shahrazad into a mother of three male children. In this closure, Shahrazad seeks Shahriyar’s forgiveness based upon her motherhood. The genealogy continues with Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890), who, in his translation, exaggerates a layer of desire that has made his translation one of the most infamous takes on The Nights according to various scholars. Both Orientalists engage in a project of reproducing and taking editorial liberties with the text, while claiming it is representative of Arabic and Islamic cultures and civilizations. This foregrounds a discourse on the imagination that was eloquently articulated in the racist works of Ernest Renan (1823-1892) where he deems Semitic languages incapable of imaginatively producing high literary works of literature. While situating the logic of this Orientalist trend as a problem of rational and secular thought clusters that dominate the study of Arabic literature and Islam, a core intervention of this dissertation is to locate how the translations of The Nights, by Orientalists, have influenced the scholarly conclusions by many Arab scholars who investigate the text of The Nights later during the postwar period. Orientalist translations limit how Arab scholars approach change, transformation, and agency in relation to their respective projects. Also, this dissertation traces a wide range of debates and methodologies. The project contributes to the field by arguing that, while the study of The Nights has significantly improved since the late 1960s, the critical methods that dominate the study of Arabic literature need to be reconsidered, especially in terms of locating meanings of social change and transformation.