The Arabian Nights Narrative Analysis

The previous stories of the Nights are a good point to begin our discussion of blackness and racial discrimination in the stories. While The Arabian Nights presents stories about the Islamic empire, it foists stories of slavery and blackness. Unlike the Atlantic trade slaves, slaves in the Arabian Nights “inhabit a different history from plantation slaves, and do not fit easily into abolitionist discourse: they were more frequently domestic or military.”(Slavery, blackness) In The Arabian Nights, there is not a single black hero in either the Syrian or the Bulaq versions. According to The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia: ‘Black people almost without exception serve as negative stereotype’ in The Arabian Nights p 500

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