content: text: BAIRD

content: text: FIGURE 4.11 A. Birrell, Sir Robert Shirley [graphic]. Engraving
on wove paper.
PUBLISHED BY EDWARD HARDING, LONDON, 1799

content: text: knowledge about remote civilizations. There is an
obvious cultural coincidence, for instanvce, between
carpet-making and storytelling among nomadic
peoples, which these stories convey through their
intricate plot development. They also tell fascinat-
ing stories about the the traffic in diamonds, gold,
and spices between the Indies, China, Arabia, and
Western Europe that  wait to be unveiled. Rather
than looking at the things of the Nights as colorful
details in Sheherazade's tales or protagonists in the
fantasticstories they make for themselves, we could
explore, instead, their role as as bearers of cultural
knowledge unintentionally embedded in the fabric
of the text. In such a reading, "historically and theo-
retically overdetermined material charactersitics
of objects are sought out beyond the immediate
context in which they appear"86 in order to

content: text: defetishize them and expose the power structures
in which they are involved.

content: text: Thus, as Makdisi and Nussbaum sum up in their
introduction to The Arabian Nights in Historical
Context: Between East and West, "the Nights offered
a particularly powerful vision of an Asiatic culture
seemingly saturated with references to sensuality,
extravagance, indulgence, violence, supernatural-
ism, and eroticism ... [and] added a supernatural
dimension to the Enlightenment; the tales offered
an avenue into modernity through its magical op-
posite, an alternative to European identity, and an
antidote to neoclassicism."87 However, reading
such imports as an expression of European pow-
ers' disavowal of the East in order to "justify their
conquest and rule over other peoples, particularly
in Asia,"88 is an oversimplification of a rather com-
plicated process of cultural exchange. None of
these descriptions of Arabia were caused by colo-
nial "distortions," as Said feared, but by false attri-
butions: "Arabian" was a misnomer that rarely de-
scribed Arabia itself. While fictional narratives like
Arabian Nights' Entertainments represented Ara-
bia as a land of magic and exorbitant riches, they
were too far-fetched to be part of a Westerner's
belief system during the Age of Reason; rather,
they were popularized because their wild fiction-
ality turned them into bestsellers at the time. Such
stories competed with descriptions of the Arabi-
an Peninsula by travelers and traders who had vis-
ited the area and had unmediated contact with the
local culture. However, while the Orientalist litera-
ture described Arabia in terms that emphasized
its exoticism, magic, superstitions, extravagance,
wealth, eroticism, excess, and myriads of other pe-
culiarities that contrasted it with the European
normativity, travel narratives created an "Arabian"
identity that was generally congruent with the
reality of the place.

content: text: 86 Elaine Freedgood, "Introduction: Reading Things," in
The Idea in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian
Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006),
5-6.

content: text: 87 Makdisi and Nussbaum, introduction to The Arabian
Nights in Historical Context, 5·
88 Ibid.