The Arabian Nights’ frame story begins with the Persian kings’-Shahryar and his brother- anger of the black African slaves, who betray them with the queens. Thus, the motive for narrating the tales of the Arabian Nights is the queens’ unfaithfulness, inflamed by the kings’ anger at the social differences between “the royal Persians and the black African servants or slaves.”(slavery). In …show more content…
This exotic luxury is achieved by distancing the “blacks” from the “non-blacks” of the “Tartars, Persians, and Indians” (Thorn 2002, 155). Galland’s translation presents an important distinction between Arab and Muslims on the one hand, and African, black and slaves on the other (slavery). Slavery and blackness in Galand’s translation is associated with the hierarchical social class and racial ideas. So the fact that Shahryar’s wife is engaged with a black man heightens the offence to