Scheherazade’s Children: Global Encounters with the Arabian Nights ed. by Philip F. Kennedy, Marina Warner (review)

Philip F. Kennedy and Marina Warner open their collection, Scheherazade’s Children, with an image of a staircase in a 2009 exhibition that symbolized the year 1453. Linking Roman and Byzantine artifacts on one floor to the Islamic artifacts on the next, this linear separation helped to tell the historiographic and militaristic story most often told. But cultural products tell “an alternative story: glass, mirrors, velvet, brocade . . . reveal a process of reverse colonization” (2). Literature speaks more readily than glass and brocade, and Alf layla wa-layla, commonly known in English as the Arabian Nights, jumped borders and indelibly sparked imaginations for centuries. Guided by Said’s Orientalism (1978) as a “catalyst,” the essays compiled in the book ask the reader to look beyond previous gazes and to view the Nights from multiple perspectives. The collected essays are organized into three parts: “Translating,” “Engaging,” and “Staging.” Within each part, the essays delve into specific intertextual or cultural interactions with the Arabian Nights.

Part 1, “Translating,” focuses the reader’s eye on the process of translation and the translators themselves. Ros Ballaster identifies the differences between the English translations and versions of the “Jullanar and Badr” of Antoine Galland, Jonathan Scott, and Lord Byron and considers the cultural and historical contexts of the audience in relation to these differences. Laurent Châtel reconsiders William Beckford as an Orientalist, placing Vathek (1786) on a continuum of translation and transmission. For the final chapter in this section, Paulo Lemos Horta examines Richard Burton’s cosmopolitan approach as translator.

The essays in Part 2, “Engaging,” show how the Arabian Nights influenced the imagination, narrative structure, and development and representation of specific literary works. Roger Pearson, Robert Irwin, and Horta uncover influences on the novels and narrative form. Irwin connects the cataloged details of daily life from the tales to the burgeoning novel form, and Pearson and Horta consider the Nights’ direct influence on Voltaire’s form and on George Eliot’s “mythmaking” in her novel Daniel Deronda (1876) (156). Elliott Colla and Wendy Doniger look at “portability,” “nonportability,” and translation: what parts of the stories travel and what must remain behind due to embedded or culturally specific meanings (90). Dominique Jullien, Philip F. Kennedy, and Katie Trumpener discuss the intertextuality between the Nights and works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Jorge Luis Borges, Denis Diderot, Elio Vittorini, Manual Puig, Masaki Kobayashi, and Vasily Grossman. The final essay in the section, by Ferial J. Ghazoul, primes the reader for the next part, by looking outside predominantly literary forms. He asks us to observe representations of Sinbad the Sailor in a novel, a painting, and a voyage. By delving into semiotic and performance literacies, Ghazoul asks us to read within different sign systems and forms of translation.

Part 3, “Staging,” shifts to performance. This section of the book offers historical, cultural, and political discussions surrounding the ways in which staging has reflected fantasies of the East, engagement with the West, and the audiences themselves. In her essay on early Indian cinema, Rosie Thomas explores the prevalent use of blended tales from the Arabian Nights both as an echo to the West and as a resonating fantasy theme in India. Karl Sabbagh, Berta Joncus, and Elizabeth Kuti all touch on the ways that British theater made specific tales from the Arabian Nights popular and how productions of these tales became part of the repertoire. Both Joncus and Sabbagh point to ways in which these productions spotlight British culture more than an imagined East. Joncus suggests that “the Orient was not so much domesticated as reduced to an ornament designed to enhance its wearer” (309). Kuti picks up a similar theme as she investigates the blending of Orientalist stage productions with a Perrault conte in Blue-Beard, or Female Curiosity (1798) by George Colman and Michael Kelly. This “innovative decision” to retell the story in a Turkish setting, “born seemingly...