At its inception, it meant the lands of Arabia - the “Near” and “Middle East.”įrom 1790–1935, before American political interests and geopolitics introduced the stereotypes of the religious radical or terrorist, Americans turned as consumers to the “Orient” as a place to raid in constructing their identities. “Oriental” is now used to talk about what used to be called the “Far East” - a Eurocentric term for China and Japan. The tradition of blackface, as discussed in The Conversation by Philip Howard, has an unnamed parallel history in western society: dressing up and pretending to be an “Oriental.” Trudeau's blackface apology rings hollow and highlights anti-Arab stereotypes bombing of Agrabah, the Disney-created fictional city in which the fictional Aladdin and Princess Jasmin lived, 30 per cent of Republicans and 19 per cent of Democrats supported the bombing. When in 2015, a polling agency decided to poll people on the potential U.S. The stories have been interpreted to highlight the real exotic otherness of Arabs/Muslims and all of the stereotypes that go with that including: their barbarity, their seclusion of women, their being bound to tradition, the lack of rule of law and so on.Īll of which is the bedrock to contemporary discourse about Muslim men as violent and women as oppressed that lead to discriminatory policies as Edward Said wrote in his 1978 seminal book, Orientalism.
This slip from story to ethnography has been very damaging to Muslims in both western discourse and policy.
Even though the original Arabic readers would have been able to distinguish the fantastical elements of the stories, they were treated by translators, publishers and western scholars as ethnographic material.
An illustration from ‘Arabian Nights.’ Rand McNally & Company, 1914/Project Gutenberg's The Arabian Nights EntertainmentsĪladdin was not part of the original manuscript but appears to have been inserted into the collection by the French translator, Antoine Galland, whose edition, published between 17, became a phenomenal success according to the late Iraqi-American islamologist and arabist, Muhsin Mahdi.
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