COML 2700 - [Forbidden Sex: Arabian Nights]

Fall. Next Offered: 2019-2020. 4 credits. Student option grading.

P. Vaziri.

When King Shahriyar spots his wife in the palace garden making love alongside forty slaves, he determines to kill all the women in his kingdom. This oft forgotten frame story inaugurates one of the most powerful narratives of world literature. What does the representation of sexual encounter in the Arabian Nights (‘Alf layla-wa layla) have to do with a politics of race and gender? This course explores the millenia-long history of mediations and translations of this ancient Perso-Arabic text across literature, film, and popular culture, in the Middle East and in Europe. We will pay attention to the transmission of phobic tropes about female sexuality and miscegenation, or “interracial” sex as they manifest in various versions of 1001 Nights across time and space.