The Arabian Nights in Transnational Perspective (review)

The Arabian Nights has captured the imaginations of European readers since the early eighteenth century, when in 1704–1717 Antoine Galland published his immensely popular and influential Les Mille et une Nuits, contes arabes traduit en français. Addressing that longstanding and ongoing popularity, The Arabian Nights in Transnational Perspective is a collection of nineteen essays that developed out of a 2004 symposium commemorating the threehundredth anniversary of Galland's work, but which moves far beyond the European frame of reference. As Ulrich Marzolph notes in his introduction to this volume, Alf Layla wa-Layla, the Arabian Nights, is a kind of "shape shifter" (xvi), a text that has repeatedly crossed boundaries of language, time, culture, and medium. The wide-ranging essays included here certainly attest to the complexities of the sources, manifestations, adaptations, and influence of Alf Layla wa-Layla—not only in forms of print culture, but also in the visual arts and oral traditions. The result is a collection that is truly interdisciplinary and international, extremely ambitious in scope. A thread that could have bound these essays together—namely, the "transnational perspective" of the book's title—is not articulated as powerfully as it could be, nor is it situated in terms of critical debates around transnationalism that have engaged political scientists, anthropologists, and media scholars for two decades.

The book is organized into five sections, and it seems fitting that the first is concerned with Galland and the resonance of his Contes Arabes with other forms of French writing—in this case, the later eighteenth-century French fiction of Jacques Cazotte. The contributions by Aboubakr Chraïbi, Sylvette Larzul, and Joseph Sadan suggest the extent to which a number of blurred boundaries—between scholarship and literary creation, the oral and the written, the familiar and the exotic—are negotiated in eighteenth-century France, where they become central to both learned and literary discourses. Further editorializing could have foregrounded the ways these three essays speak to or complicate some of the current understandings of transnationalism, including what Homi Bhabha has called "counter-narratives of the nation" (Nation and Narration, 1990), those counter-hegemonic narratives that challenge and disturb essentialist constructions of national identity.

The four essays in the second section of the volume, "Texts and Contexts of the Arabian Nights," examine thematic concerns in the tales (as in Hasan El-Shamy's study of sibling relationships and Robert Irwin's piece on political philosophies) and textual histories (such as Gert Jan van Gelder's study of tales, both within and beyond the Nights, which feature a slave girl as a central and generally admirable character). At least one of the essays in this part of the book has the potential to speak directly to the "transnational" concerns suggested by the volume's title and established in section one: Heinz Grotzfeld's study of the text's manuscript history. Grotzfeld's contribution demonstrates that long before Galland, Arabic compilers and copyists made efforts to produce "complete" versions of the Nights, capitalizing on the text's popularity and marketability. Grotzfeld's essay also includes embedded observations that have the potential of challenging prevailing "wisdom" regarding the European manipulation and commodification of the Nights' content and distinctive narrative form. Nineteenth-century Britons frequently cited the formal structure of the text—its division into "nights," which interrupt the flow of Shahrazad's storytelling—as a mark of cultural difference, as characteristically oriental and too tedious for modern British sensibilities. Grotzfeld's work suggests that the impatient British common readers of the nineteenth century had Arabic "forerunners in the tenth century" (54), and once again the citation of the Nights as an aesthetic manifestation of otherness is revealed to be highly problematic.

The two essays that comprise the third section, "Framing as Form and Meaning," offer fascinating comparative perspectives on the narrative that sets the Nights in motion, the frame story that establishes the Shahrazad as storyteller. In her contribution, Sadhana Naithani examines the respective frame stories of the...