"The Arabian Nights" in Historical Context: Between East and West (review)

A heterogeneous entity of no single determinate origin, The Arabian Nights presents something of a scholarly mystery. Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum's remarkable collection of essays goes a long way towards dispelling the mystery—although not the enchantment—of the text's evolution, as the contributors trace the labours, literary currents, and historical vicissitudes that shaped and were shaped by this fantastic, mercurial body of tales. From the early Arabic oral tradition to the fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript used by Antoine Galland in his 1704 French translation to the tales' circulation across Europe and their eventual return to the Arabic novel, the global travels of The Arabian Nights rival the extravagant wanderings depicted within the tales themselves.

The editors' introduction describes the extraordinary popularity and influence of The Arabian Nights as it crisscrossed the globe (eighty versions and twenty different editions in Britain alone in the eighteenth century). The text, or cluster of texts, is the offspring of numerous editions, translations, compilations, redactions, imitations, parodies, rewritings, and forgeries. The vertiginous instability of the text proper does not, however, cancel out its agency; in the language of the argument, the book seems to possess a kind of magical autonomy, not unlike the supernatural powers attributed to the enchanted objects contained within it: "Alf layla wa layla," the editors declare, "changed the world on a scale unrivalled by any other text" (1).

The introduction grapples with the legacy of Edward Said's influential Orientalism, using the Nights to reorient the enduring antithe sis of East and West. If the Nights at times depict the East as a sensual, violently despotic, irrational culture to be pitted against western modernity—a vision of the Orient readily harnessed to imperial projects—the novelty and enchantment of the tales also offered a space of freedom and fantasy, a counter-narrative to Enlightened modernity. The tales alternately enabled Europeans to disavow aspects of their own culture by projecting it onto an Other and served as a means of attacking western culture under an exotic guise; they offered modes of reading and writing that superseded the mimetic promises of realism and the empathetic models of identificatory reading. The word "between" in the collection's subtitle (Between East and West) thus goes—and potentially allows us to have it—both ways, marking out the separation of Orient and Occident even as it locates The Arabian Nights as a mediating form that refuses such a division.

The essays for the most part live up to the ambitious agenda laid out in the introduction. In her study of the convergence of aesthetic and anthropological investments that make Galland's 1704 translation an act of transculturation, Madeleine Dobie wonderfully argues that the much-invoked notion of the "contact zone" presupposes the co-presence of defined groups localized in space and time, disguising how cultural contact is often experienced as a "blind interface" that eludes clear-cut description. Focusing on the enduring imagery of the Nights as a luxurious garden in an attempt to grapple with the text's "universal meaning and significance"—an assertion of a shared transhistorical meaning that seems simultaneously wishful and troubling—Robert Mack offers a useful account of the numerous editions across the centuries (60). Nabil Matar shows that Arabic versions of the tales are no more static than the European, charting the devolution from the harmonious relations between Islam and Christianity depicted in the earlier cycles to the growing antagonism and intolerance in the first Arabic-language edition of 1835.

Examining the fantasies of social mobility and autonomy in female-authored Oriental tales, Khalid Bekkaoui argues that the heroines' renunciation of Christianity in order to remain with their Muslim lovers indicates the instability of European hegemony vis-à-vis an allurng Other. Ros Ballaster considers the mediating presence of Scheherazade's sister Dinarzade, arguing that eighteenth-century women writers present communities...