Introduction
Racism refers to the act of distinguishing the superiority or otherwise of members belonging to a particular race and discriminating them based on their appearance and perceived characteristics. Depending on the language and the characters that writers choose to use while writing stories, a text may propagate racism by including characters that reflect certain races as inferior while also portraying other characters perceived as representing other races as superior. Accordingly, the manner in which scholars portray racism in their stories may differ from one’s personal prejudices to the period when the story was written. Ultimately, the extent of racism in stories may differ depending on whether a person is reading the stories from the perspective of the 21st century or interpreting the narratives on their own terms. Reading the narratives in the Arabian Nights while taking them on their terms reveal that virtually all the narratives represent simple romances and exciting expeditions by various characters and there is no indication of racism from any of the stories, but reading the same tales from the 21st century perspective reveal some aspects of racism.
Reading the stories in the Arabian Nights, individually or collectively, while taking them on their terms; it is important to note that they do not give any indication of elevating a specific race over another. The narrators in all the stories seem to have avoided the possibilities of perpetuating racism by making sure that their focus is mainly on romantic subjects as well as the use of abstract characters. The use of abstract character is a particularly common aspect in most of the stories and this is an important tactic in ensuring that the characters are nonrepresentational hence readers cannot associate the characteristics of such characters with people from certain races. By incorporating the use of abstract characters in the stories, the writers have made their narratives attractive to read among people from different races and from one generation to the next. This aspect is apparent given that on face value the stories do not seem racist and continue to be popular despite the authors having written the narratives centuries ago. The common themes in the stories in the Arabian Nights include jealousy in The Story of Two Sisters Who Were Jealous of Their Younger Sister, power and prosperity in The Adventures of Haroun-al-Raschid, Caliph of Bagdad, and wealth in Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp. The foregoing themes do not seem to associate with racism when one considers the stories on their plain meaning.
On the contrary, when reading the stories from the 21st century perspective, the stories reveal some aspect of racism. The difference between reading the narratives on their face value and reading the same from the viewpoint of the 21st century is the fact that the latter focuses too much on demystifying discrimination of people based o their appearance and race. There is too much heightening of racial aspects given that most of the media stories and 21st century narratives seek to use actual characters whose traits the readers end up associating with the race that certain characters exhibit in the tales or the manner in which the writer portrays specific characters. For instance, the emphasis of a “black dog” in The Story of the Second Old Man, and of the Two Black Dogs is likely to attract more attention from readers while interpreting the narrative from the 21st century perspective. The actual meaning and insinuation of the phrase “black dogs” may differ depending on the point of view of the reader when interpreting he text. For instance, one may consider the fact the insistence of dogs being black has a hidden meaning that is meant to portray the traits of the dogs as common to the people who usually have a black skin tone. It is clear that a dog, regardless of its color will remain a dog. As such, it would suffice for the author to write about dogs rather than insist that the dogs are black given that there is no evidence from the narrative to the effect that the color of the dogs determine their character. From the 21st century perspective, readers are likely to dwell more on the words and phrases that seek to qualify a noun such as the blackness when it comes to interpreting the attributes of the dogs. Accordingly, in the story of The Enchanted Horse, there is the insistence of an Indian with a wooden horse appearing before the King of the Persian kingdom of Schiraz. The consistent reference to the man with the wooden horse as Indian is racist if one considers it from the 21st century perspective. The narrator could have used “man with a wooden horse” but chose to use Indian instead of man. In the context of the 21st century interpretation, one can consider Indians to be foreigners or people not suitable to marry from the royalty. In this regard, it is possible for a reader to conclude that the Persians discriminate against Indians.
In order to understand the intensification of racist perspective in the 21st century, it is important to comprehend the aspect of racism and ethnicity during the Victorian era given that the narratives were written around this period. During the Victorian period, “black” was a racial identification term used on a wide currency of things, not necessarily for the identification of the people of the African origin. In fact, during the nineteenth century, people with African ancestors ignored the use of the term “Negro” for self-identification in favor of the more progressive term “black” in a bid to associate themselves with aura of what came to be known as “black power” (Gerzina 55). In this regard, the term “black” became less associated with an oppressed race and faded as an adjective for referring to “people of color”. The fact that the term black is not necessarily used to denote the oppression or racism in the Arabian Nights stories is evident in The Story of the Envious Man and of Him Who Was Envied where the word black is used as an adjective to describe various things including a mountain, a horse, and a cloud (Lang 78). The term black is also used to describe stones in The Story of Two Sisters Who Were Jealous of Their Younger Sister (266). Ultimately, while reading the Victorian literature one does not encounter the emergence of a self-identified black community from which one can perceive the existence of racism, instead, one ends up studying individual characters whose traits do not qualify as the general character of the community from which they belong. From the narratives in the Arabian Nights, it is apparent that literary writers during the Victorian era did not write stories in the racist perspectives, either because they ignored the subject or simply because there were no ethnic and racial categories within the society. Some scholars such as Kenan Malik argue that racism must relate to the cultural and social contexts from which it originates such that the theories people develop with the intention of introducing racism to social class should not be applied discriminately to the interactions between the Whites and people of color (94). However, although blackness during the nineteenth century does not seem to identify people of color, the literary writers in the latter centuries seem to use blackness to introduce different meanings that appear to identify with the specific race, usually the people with African ancestry, while also associating whiteness with the Whites (Guess 656). However, this does not mean that the writers in the 19th century did not acknowledge the existence of racism. For instance, one of the most conspicuous narratives in the nineteenth century that associates Africans with blackness is the Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Throughout the novel, Conrad manages to create a clear distinction between Africa as a place full of darkness and London as a place that represents dawn. Ultimately, the central theme of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is the distinction between the people associated with savagery and those that writers depict as civilized.
The fact that racism was a factor in the nineteenth century when most, if not all, the narratives in the Arabian Nights were written, and the reality that the stories do not focus on racist themes shows that literary writers had the opportunity to focus on racism but did not consider the subject interesting enough. From an ordinary interpretation of the narratives, there is no indication of racist themes. Nevertheless, a 21st century interpretation of the stories reveals some aspects of racism based on the choice of certain adjectives before some nouns.
Work Cited
Gerzina, Gretchen. Black Victorians/Black Victoriana. New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 2003.
Lang, Andrew (Eds.). The Arabian Nights Entertainments. Feedbooks, 1898.
Malikv, Kenan. The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society. New York:
New York University Press, 1996.
