1889 Exposition Universelle Bibliography

 

*I was fortunate enough to teach a 1001 Nights film and literature course last Fall (2021). And I'm even more fortunate to have had such great students. They've let me share their work with you. Bibliography, Annotated Bibliography, and a further report on one article related to their topic (which in some cases is loosely Nights-related). I'll be posting them over the next few weeks. 

**I messed up the formats with my copying and pasting but you know. - M

Here is Shaanel's work on the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle - 

Shaanel Saroch

Professor Michael Lundell

English 260

14 December 2021

Research Project

Part One: Extended Bibliography

“About Us about the Bie Who We Are How We Work Our History the 1928 Paris Convention FAQS about Expos What Is an Expo? How Is an Expo Organised? A Short History of Expos.” Official Site of the Bureau International Des Expositions, https://www.bie-paris.org/site/en/1889-paris. 

Anido, Julien. “The Exposition Universelle of 1889: Un Jour De plus à Paris.” Un Jour De plus à Paris | L'incontournable Des Visites Culturelles Et Touristiques à Paris. Balades, Visites Guidées, Découvertes Insolites... Visitez Paris Autrement !, 29 July 2020, https://www.unjourdeplusaparis.com/en/paris-reportage/exposition-universelle-1889. 

Bibesco, Georges. Exposition Universelle 1889. Impr. Typ. J. Kugelmann, 1890. 

Catalogue général Officiel: Exposition rétrospective Du Travail Et Des Sciences Anthropologiques. Imprimerie L. Danel, 1889. 

Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., https://www.britannica.com/topic/International-Exposition-of-1889. 

“Exposition Universelle (1889).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 25 Nov. 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposition_Universelle_(1889). 

Exposition Universelle De 1889, https://www.nga.gov/research/library/imagecollections/photographs-of-international-expositions/exposition-universelle-de-1889.html. 

Jonnes, Jill. Eiffel's Tower and the World's Fair Where Buffalo Bill Beguiled Paris, the Artists Quarreled, and Thomas Edison Became a Count. Viking, 2009. 

"Mephisto", the Marvellous Automaton, Exhibited at the International Theatre, Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1889. T. Pettitt & Co, 1889. 

“Paris 1889 Exposition: History, Images, Interpretation.” Ideas, http://www.arthurchandler.com/paris-1889-exposition. 

“Paris Exposition of 1889.” Paris Exposition of 1889 (Prints and Photographs Reading Room, Library of Congress), https://www.loc.gov/rr/print/coll/250_paris.html. 

Paris-exposition... / Exposition universelle de 1889. A. Colin (Paris), 1889.

Paris: Capital of the 19th Century, https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/worldfairs.html. 

“The Rue Du Caire at the Exposition Universelle in Paris (1889): Patrimoines Partagés تراث مشترك.” The Rue Du Caire at the Exposition Universelle in Paris (1889) | Patrimoines Partagés تراث مشترك, https://heritage.bnf.fr/bibliothequesorient/en/street-of-cairo-art. 

Sabry, Randa. “Le Témoignage d’Amīn Fikrī Sur l’Exposition Universelle de 1889 et La Rue Du Caire : Petite Polémique Avec Timothy Mitchell.” Arabica, vol. 2018, no. 3, Brill, 2018, pp. 368–91, https://doi.org/10.1163/15700585-12341493.

Sayers, Isabelle S. Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill's Wild West. Dover, 1981. 

“World's Fair - Official Eiffel Tower Website.” La Tour Eiffel, 8 Apr. 2020, https://www.toureiffel.paris/en/the-monument/universal-exhibition. 

Part Two: Annotated Bibliography

Paris-exposition... / Exposition universelle de 1889. A. Colin (Paris), 1889.

The author created this book as a guide to visitors of the Exposition Universelle in 1889. The beginning of the book has maps of the exposition so that the reader can see where the different things to do and see are located. Further on there is a map of different areas in Paris associated with the exposition. The author details what he believes are the most interesting things to see at the exposition so that visitors need not waste time on less interesting displays. There is also a schedule of when certain events are happening and a description of the public transportation that could be used to get to the exposition. This guide is very useful in finding out what exactly went on at the exposition. 

Jonnes, Jill. Eiffel's Tower and the World's Fair Where Buffalo Bill Beguiled Paris, the Artists Quarreled, and Thomas Edison Became a Count. Viking, 2009. 

This book provides the back story of why the Exposition Universelle was created. The book also details different major personalities that were present at the exposition such as Buffalo Bill, Gustave Eiffel and Thomas Edison. While these personalities are famous now and were well known at the time as well, the book also lists people that were relatively unknown at the time who are now famous. Some of these people were Van Gogh, Whistler and Gaugin. The book makes the reader feel as if they are personally experiencing the Exposition Universelle in 1889. 

Sabry, Randa. “Le Témoignage d’Amīn Fikrī Sur l’Exposition Universelle de 1889 et La Rue Du Caire : Petite Polémique Avec Timothy Mitchell.” Arabica, vol. 2018, no. 3, Brill, 2018, pp. 368–91, https://doi.org/10.1163/15700585-12341493.

This article discusses a man named Amin Fikri’s visit to the 1889 Exposition Universelle. He details the Rue du Caire which was a street, built for the exposition, meant to emulate a busy street in Cairo. Buildings on the street were made from demolished buildings from Egypt. The author also discusses how the previous expositions in Paris had different versions of the Rue du Caire. In the 1867 exposition there was a medieval Egyptian palace. This article is a good resource for visualizing the Egyptian displays at the various expositions. 

Part Three

Paris: Capital of the 19th Century, https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/worldfairs.html. 

Author: The author of this piece is Pauline De Tholozany. This text was created as a collaboration between the departments of French Studies and Comparative Literature at Brown University. These departments relevance to the topic is that the Exposition Universelle in 1889 occurred in Paris, France and the authors use different sources of literature to detail the events. The author seems like an expert in this field because they comprehensively cover all the various expositions that occurred in France from 1855 to 1900. The French Studies department’s contact information is french_francophone_studies@brown.edu. Their online bio is located at https://www.brown.edu/academics/french-studies/. The Comparative Literature department’s contact information is Comp_lit@Brown.edu. Their online bio is located at https://complit.brown.edu/. I did not attempt to contact them. 

Thesis: The thesis of this text is that the purpose of the Expositions Universelle in Paris was to showcase technology and art and to boost the economy. The thesis is built by highlighting the various events and displays that were held during the Expositions Universelle. The evidence the authors use to support their thesis are several primary and secondary sources from the Brown University library such as books with firsthand accounts of the expositions and different artwork that show scenes from the expositions. The question that the author is responding to is “why were the expositions in Paris held?”

Critique: Elements of this text that are good specifically is that the text covers the politic climate, attitudes towards the fairs, and the most interesting events at the fairs. This allows the reader to feel like they were present at the fairs and as if the reader has an eye into the inner working of the fair organizers. Another good element of this text is that the authors used excellent sources while writing the text so there is a lot of interesting and informative data. There were not really any issues to address on this topic in this text other than dispelling rumors of people feeling negatively towards the Eiffel tower and talk of wanting to prevent its construction. The issue is addressed by saying what the actual public sentiment around the Eiffel tower was. One thing that is lacking in my text is any talk of public figures that were present at the 1889 Exposition Universelle. Personalities such as Wild Bill Hickok, Thomas Edison, and Vincent Van Gogh were all present at this exposition and it would have been interesting to read more about their interaction with the exposition. 

Timeliness: This text was written in 2011. The text utilized other relevant scholarship as resources for creating this piece. I don’t believe that timeliness is relevant or important to investigate for this text’s focus because the article is reporting on events that occurred a long time ago for historical purposes. This text does not really have any effect on current events, so timeliness is not an issue. 

Relevance: This text is extremely relevant to the topic of Exposition Universelle 1889. The text not only details the Exposition Universelle that occurred in 1889 it also describes the other expositions that occurred in France and performs some comparison of the fairs in order to understand the different impacts of the fairs on the events of that time period. The only new information that this article gives on the topic is discussing the Exposition Universelle 1889 in relation to the other expositions. I did not find information like this in any of the other texts that I read.

Future Ideas: A course on the topic of the Exposition Universelle that occurred in 1889 could incorporate this text in the beginning of the course as a historical background to this particular exposition and its relation to the other expositions that occurred. An essay assignment on this text might pose questions like “which exposition had the greatest effect on French culture,” “What is the most significant technological advance that came from the Exposition Universelle that occurred in 1889,” or “What impact did the Exposition Universelle in 1889 have on the art world at that time.” All of these questions would make for essays that I would be interested in reading. 

What I Learned: One new thing that I learned about my topic from this specific text is that the Exposition Universelle took some of the power away from the Salon. The Salon was the only way to get your art publicly exhibited in France around this time. It was very difficult to get one’s art in the Salon and the people who chose the art that would be displayed were very political and exclusionary. During the Exposition Universelle artists were able to display their art without the judgement and control of the Salon. This had a huge impact on the art world at that time. What I might do in the future with this information is to apply this knowledge to the art history class I will be taking next semester. Previously I took a class on art that discussed the Salon but did not go in depth about it. As I take various courses, I feel like I learn a little bit in each class that adds up like pieces of a puzzle and eventually I have a greater understanding of a bigger picture of what happened during certain times in history. 

An Overview of Research Methodologies: I found this source by googling the Exposition Universelle in 1889. I chose this article because it came from a reputable source such as the French Studies and Comparative Literature departments at Brown University. I also chose this article because it discussed all the expositions instead of just mentioning the exposition that I was studying. I felt like learning about the other expositions gave context to the specific exposition that I was interested in. 

Chateaubriand’s Travels in Greece, Palestine

 

“From a new work, ‘Chateaubriand’s Travels in Greece, Palestine, &c. in 1806 & 1807,’ we extract the following interesting passages, descriptive of various scenes”

It was midnight when we arrived at the kan of Menemen. I perceived at a distance a great number of scattered lights : it was a caravan making a halt. On a nearer approach I distinguished camels, some lying, others standing, some with their load others relieved from the burden. Horses and asses without bridles were eating barley out of leather buckets;  some of the men were still on horseback, and the women, veiled, had not alighted from their dromedaries. Turkish merchants were seated cross-legged on carpets in groups round the fires, at which the slaves were busily employed in dressing pilau. Other travellers were smoking their pipes at the door of the kan, chewing opium, and listening to stories. Here were people burning coffee in iron pots ; the hucksters went about from fire to fire offering cakes, fruit and poultry for sale. Singers were amusing the crowd; imans were performing their ablutions, prostrating themselves, rising again and invoking the prophet; and the camel-drivers lay snoring on the ground. The place was strewed with packages, bags of cotton, and couffs of rice. All these objects, now distinct and reflecting a vivid light, now confused and enveloped in a half shade, exhibited a genuine scene of the Arabian Nights. It wanted nothing but the caliph Haroun al Raschid, the vizir Giaffar, and Mesrour, the chief of the black eunuchs."

"Travels in Greece, &c." National Intelligencer, 15 Apr. 1813. Accessed 4 Mar. 2021.

New Yorker Review of Disney's Live Action Aladdin

 Here's a great and hilarious review of Disney's live action car wreck Aladdin (2019). 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/03/a-live-action-aladdin-falls-short-of-its-animated-predecessor

And some clips: 

"The director of the latest “Aladdin” is a middle-aged white Brit, Guy Ritchie, but the diversity of his cast is quite in keeping with the tangled roots of the tale. We have an African-American, Will Smith, as the Genie, and a Cairo-born Coptic Canadian, Mena Massoud, as Aladdin. Princess Jasmine, whom he woos, is played by Naomi Scott, whose Ugandan mother is of Gujarati Indian descent. Marwan Kenzari, a Dutch-Tunisian actor, takes the part of the dastardly vizier, Jafar. The show is deftly stolen, like a bracelet slipped from a wrist, by the Iranian-American Nasim Pedrad, famed for her impersonations on “Saturday Night Live,” which run all the way—and it’s a hell of a way—from Kim Kardashian to Christiane Amanpour. Here, Pedrad plays Jasmine’s handmaiden, Dalia, who, in an unprecedented twist, has a crush on the Genie. Good luck with that."

"Yet Ritchie has made significant alterations. First, he has modified the law of sultanic succession by giving women the right to rule. Second, by some cunning spell, he has taken all the fun from the earlier Disney film and—abracadabra!—made it disappear. The big musical numbers strain for pizzazz. The action sequences are a confounding rush, which is a grave drawback amid the alleys of the bazaar. And Jafar is about as frightening as the rug, though the fault, I’d suggest, lies less with the actor than with Disney, which is busy rebooting its cartoons with human performers and hoping that we won’t notice the difference. But the Jafar of 1992 derived his power from the ease with which he swelled and stretched, like a sort of evil taffy. Animation, in other words, became him. Ritchie tries to repeat the trick with C.G.I., to graceless and cumbersome effect."

Barnum & Bailey's Circus

Poster for Barnum & Bailey's Persia or the Pageants of The Thousand and One Nights (1916)

And also the following info about the show is from the book, From Barnum & Bailey to Feld by Ernest Albrecht (2014):

Aladdin Scentsy Bars - May 20

So, like, yeah. On May 20th you can buy Disney Aladdin based/themed Scentsy bars. It wasn't clear to me exactly what a scentsy bar was so I did some "research" and found out that they seem to be these wax scented thingys that you warm up in your house to make your house smell a certain way. Those plug-in scent blaster things that always give me allergic headaches. I think that's what they are.

But now you can have your house smell like Aladdin! And the Arabian Nights!

(WTF??)

Not until May 20th though. And Disney's live action Aladdin hits the big screen on May 24. 

Disney's Aladdin Teaser Trailer - In Theaters May 24th, 2019

Well amigos. It continues. Here is the Disney trailer for its live-action version of Aladdin. Will Smith as the Genie.

(De) Toppers - 1001 Nights

This is the Orientalist-out-of-control introduction to a (De) Toppers concert in 2013.

The song they intro with, "1001 Nights," was originally done by Dutch pop band Ch!pz as "1001 Arabian Nights."

Enjoy!

If you'd like more, here they are in 1001 Nights' shirts dancing around Turkey, singing a version of Marc Anthony's song "Vivir Mi Vida" - 

Live-Action Aladdin Casting Controversy

Disney's live action version of its animated 1992 Aladdin is currently in production. Recently, the company announced who would be playing the various parts and it has provoked some controversy. In 1992 groups in the US and elsewhere pressured Disney to change the animated film because of its lyrics and portrayals of the "East" and some parts of the movie and its lyrics were changed after its initial release. 

That did little to erase what many saw as Disney's continued misrepresentation of race and culture. 

This Fortune.com opinion piece by Germine Awad aptly highlights some of the critical viewpoints that have been levied against the upcoming live-action version:

How Disney Blew a Huge Opportunity While Casting Aladdin - http://fortune.com/2017/07/21/disney-aladdin-cast-naomi-scott/

"With the recent backlash in Hollywood surrounding the casting of white actors to play characters of color, Disney went to great lengths to mount a large-scale, worldwide search to find culturally appropriate actors for the live-action reboot of Aladdin. Reportedly, more than 2,000 actors read for the parts of Jasmine and Aladdin. The process resulted in Mena Massoud, a Canadian Egyptian, being cast as Aladdin; and Naomi Scott, a woman of British and Indian heritage, landing the role of Jasmine. The casting call included a search for actors of both Middle Eastern and Indian descent, presumably to widen the net of potential actors that could realistically depict Middle Easterners.

 

The backlash against Disney for choosing Naomi Scott, a woman not of Middle Eastern descent, to depict Jasmine is partially a response to the notion that individuals of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent are interchangeable. This is not the first time that South Asians and Middle Easterners have been mistaken for one another. Shortly after the 9/11 terror attacks, a Sikh man was murdered in a hate crime aimed at someone of Middle Eastern descent. Individuals of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent both experienced a rise in hate crimes post -9/11.

There is a psychological concept that explains this phenomenon called the outgroup homogeneity effect, where majority group members see the uniqueness and individuality within their own group, but see minority group members as homogeneous. In other words, the majority views the minority as all being the same.

In a climate that includes Muslim bans and general anti-immigration rhetoric, children of Middle Eastern descent are constantly bombarded with negative messages about Middle Easterners. Author and lecturer Jack Shaheen documented the longstanding negative media portrayals of Arabs in films and television. He noted that Arab characters tend to be terrorists; passive, oppressed women; rich oil sheiks; or brutes."

The enduring lure of The Arabian Nights - Muhsin Al Musawi

This is a recent interview by Gulf News of (here very defensive sounding) Colombia Professor Muhsin Al Musawi on the Nights.

What is most interesting to me is Al Musawi's critique of what he sees as Western interference into the legacy of the culture of the Nights.

Excerpts below, entire interview (unfortunately with pop up ads and the like) here: http://gulfnews.com/culture/books/the-enduring-lure-of-the-arabian-nights-1.1876775

-------------------------------------

“The Arabian Nights” was largely ignored simply because it was not an elite piece of literature, and it wasn’t until the French (1704-12) and English (1706) translations were published that it was taken seriously. To tell the Arab intelligentsia how it was received by eminent poets, writers and essayists was not an ordinary matter, especially as this intelligentsia suffers from a Western dependency complex.

------------------------------------

You have a new project, almost ready: “The Arabian Nights: A Source Record”. The preliminary title suggests a lot but also seems to hide more.

I can quote from the introduction as it has not appeared yet, and I hope readers will use it with due acknowledgement to us as well as to the newspaper. This quote introduces the reader to early scholarly discussion of origins:

Aside from Edward William Lane’s (1801-76) enduring contribution to the sociological interest in the tales in its colonial dimension, his endeavour to establish a “sound” text, albeit with scriptural tone and style, still elicits scholarly interest. No less pertinent is the British periodical criticism of the years 1838-41, which, while highly informed by the British imperial quest, was mainly provoked by the latter’s significant achievement. It is only a sign of this encompassing imperial spirit that this criticism took into account German and French contributions to assimilate or debate within a broad colonial spectrum. While the evangelical spirit was bent on replacing Eastern cultures with that of the empire, the Orientalist was keen on preserving local traditions to ensure a better and solid acculturation beyond the vagaries of change.

Lane was no minor figure in this encounter, as his lexicon, studies of the “manners” of the Egyptians and translation of “The Thousand and One Nights” elicited further communications and interests. A case in point is the Athenaeum effort to elucidate the involved history of the “Nights”. Although taking into account contemporaneous views of de Sacy, von Hammer, Schlegel and Lane, the Athenaeum critic of the 1830s was fully aware of the pitfalls of basing final judgments regarding the date of composition on scattered references to historical events. No great value must be set on these allusions in a book that passed into many redactions and underwent a number of omissions, changes and interpolations. A “careful and critical examination of the tales,” he postulated, “would convince the reader that they were chiefly composed by illiterate persons, unacquainted with the history of their country; and it is unfair, therefore, to assume the accuracy of some particular date referred to, considering the numberless anachronisms contained in the work, and urge it as an argument either in favour or against opinions respecting the authorship, or age when written.”

Disapproving of Lane’s conclusion that the social and cultural setting points to an Egyptian origin, the reviewer observed that Islam regulates and models manners and customs in the whole Muslim East, establishing social conformity to which the “Nights” plainly attests. As for the very distinctive Egyptian traits, the reviewer urged that they be seen in the light of the tendency of copyists and compilers to impose their regional predilections on the text.

But what about the discussion of manuscripts, before Brill’s print of Galland’s Arabic manuscript?

Writing about manuscripts is a challenge, for no matter how authoritative and painstaking the search is, there are two sides to the question. One relates to availability of manuscripts, and the second to orality, transmission and storytelling. While Arabic scholarship was not enthusiastically drawn to popular culture, European scholarship was more interested in reading the tales as both manifestations of culture and life, as they deemed, and as indices of the spirit and language varieties of the region. Hence the interest in origin.

The Athenaeum reviewer was not alone; but his recapitulations were in response to an ongoing discussion that received further impetus after the publication of Lane’s annotated edition. Lane was keen on establishing that the work was by one single author who composed it between 1475 and 1525 (preface to “The Arabian Nights Entertainments”, London, 1839-41). Silvestre de Sacy had already dwelt on this issue (as documented by Chauvin and Littmann) in “Journal des savants”, 1817, 678; “Recherches sur l’Origine du Recueil des Contes Intitules les Mille et Une Nuits”, Paris, 1829; and in the “Memoires de l’Academie des Inscriptions & Belles-Lettres”, x, 1833, 30.

In these interventions de Sacy debated both single authorship and connectedness with Persian and Indian collections, dismissing the early reference by Al Masudi (336/947, re-edited in 346/957) as spurious. Just opposite to these views were Joseph von Hammer’s (“Wiener Jahrbücher”, 1819, 236; JA, 1e serie, x; 3e serie, viii; preface to his “Die noch Nicht übersetzten Erzaehlungen”) where he built his argument on Al Masudi, stressing therefore the genuineness of this as evidence of a collection of non-Arab origin.

Bruce Fudge - "More Translators of The Thousand and One Nights"

 Borges (1968) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Luis_Borges

Bruce Fudge on the continued legacy of Borges' judgements and predictions about the variety of translations of the Nights and the latest contemporary "Western" translations of the story collection.

" Obviously, much has changed since Borges’ day, not least the status of the Encyclopaedia  Britannica. We no longer want (consciously, anyway) to find Shakespeare or Flaubert in our translations from the Arabic. But in a sense, the twenty-first-century versions are heeding Borges’ critique. They, too, are only conceivable “in the wake of a literature.” The difference is that the new translations must be conceived in the wake of an Arabic literature.

It is true that the Penguin translation has a Spartan quality akin to the German of Littmann, as other reviewers have noted. But this quality is itself a result of a deep engagement with the Arabic text. One is never far from the original with Lyons, and as I have suggested, reading him is perhaps the closest to reading Calcutta II or Būlāq. The Pléiade edition is richer. This is most evident from the notes and critical apparatus that show both the translators’ deep command of the Arabic literary tradition and their evident passion for The Thousand and One Nights as a part of that tradition. None is particularly concerned with their readers’ own backgrounds: the assumption is that the reader, too, seeks authenticity. Perhaps in the next century scholars will look back and marvel at the priority of text over reader, but for the time being, both Penguin and Pléiade fit the current Zeitgeist."

His article - "More Translators of The Thousand and One Nights" from the Journal of the American Oriental Society can be read here:

https://www.academia.edu/24654499/More_Translators_of_The_Thousand_and_One_Nights_JAOS_136_2016_135-146

1001 Nights Soap Pulled After Complaints

Aldi soap in Germany pulls 1001 Nights soap after people complained about the image of the Hagia Sophia on its label. The complaints argued that the image was blasphemous.


"Aldi's troubles began in December of last year, when they stacked their shelves with a liquid soap called "Ombia - 1001 Nacht," or "1,001 Nights," named after the famous Arabian nights fables. The crucial detail: those who have complained say the soap's packaging allegedly shows a mosque.
Muslim customers viewed the item as offensive, saying a mosque did not belong even in the vicinity of a lavatory. Many contacted Aldi Süd on the supermarket's Facebook page.

"When I saw your liquid soap by Ombia on your shelves, I was a little shocked since it showed a mosque," one of Aldi Süd's Facebook friends posted on the social network in German. "The mosque with its dome and minarets is a symbol that stands for dignity and respect for Muslims. That's why I don't find it appropriate to depict this meaningful image on an item of daily use."

Resolution attempt backfired

Aldi reacted swiftly about the potentially blasphemous soap. It issued a statement on Facebook saying that it would remove the item from its stores. "We're sorry that you were irritated by the design of our soap," Aldi apologized. "Of course, we have forwarded your note to the appropriate contact person in this house so that they are informed and sensitized to the issue.""

Full article at DW - http://www.dw.de/soap-opera-erupts-over-aldi-packaging/a-18202778

Salesman Paul Brennan lost in Opa Locka's 1001 Streets

The 1969 film Salesman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salesman_%28film%29) is something you should run out and rent immediately. It is a beautifully shot documentary following several door-to-door Bible salesmen in the 1960s. In one sequence one of the salesmen, Paul Brennan, gets lost in the city of Opa Locka, Florida and thus in its 1001 Nights built layout. You can see a lot of the street names here and get a glimpse of the Orientalized city hall. At the end of this clip he tells his coworkers he was lost in the "Muslim district".

Sinbad The Fifth Voyage (2014)

Here is the trailer for the new film Sinbad The Fifth Voyage ("Inspired by the Arabian Nights!") from Giant Flick Films. Many thanks to Paul for passing this on.




Some of the exaggerated accents by the actors in the clip are particularly interesting ("Sunbod"?). The effects seem like a mix of Harryhausen inspired monsters and costumed actors with model sets ala Godzilla. AKA "Epic!"

Sinbad The Fifth Voyage was released February 7 of this year in limited screenings in the USA.

Patrick Stewart stars as a narrator.

More information (including "behind the scenes" video clips) at - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1403862/

Black Bagdad - John H. Craige

 

Black Bagdad: The Arabian Nights Adventures of a Marine Captain in Haiti is a book by John H. Craige about his time spent in the US Military in Haiti. It was written/published in the early 1930s.

It is interesting to me because of its overt connections to the Nights alongside Western depictions of race/culture/strangeness/other.


Text below from the book selling website - http://www.scuttlebuttsmallchow.com/bgdad1.html

"A.L. Burt Company, NY & Chicago, 1933. By arrangement with Minton Balch & Co., VG+/VG--. Second Impression (April 1933).

This was one of the first books to bring voodoo to the attention of the outer world. Jacket blurb (ca. 1933): "No one has seen Haiti more intimately than Capt Craige of the U.S. Marine Corps. For a number of years he was loaned to the Haitian Government and served as a white officer of the black troops of that republic. His first duty was in a wild & mountainous interior district nearly half as large as the State of New Jersey. Here the inhabitants shuffled on the sides of their feet. Some of them had peanut-heads and could not straighten their knee-joints.

Captain Craige learned their language, on which he is an authority. He went to their dances, attended their funerals, studied their weird, primitive religion,-- the voodoo. The natives called him Papa Blanc, White Father. Then he was called to take charge of the Police Force of Port au Prince, capital of Haiti. He found the city a black Bagdad full of happenings & tales as fantastic, exciting & beautiful as any Scheherazade related of the days of Haroun al Raschid. Voodoo rites, cannibalism, black magic, *wangas* were all part of his daily routine.

He tells the story in distinguished prose that carries the reader breathless from the opening paragraph to the last sentence. That a Marine officer could write such a book is remarkable, but Captain Craige is a remarkable man. In his youth he studied divinity and is acquainted with the classical tongues as well as several of the languages of western Europe. His adult life as described in a "Profile" in the *New Yorker* sounds like the exploits of a modern D'Artagnan: he has been a professional gambler, a gold miner in Alaska, heavy-weight champion of France, a sailor, a newspaper man, to mention only a few of his non-military activities. He has served under the flags of Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua & Honduras, as well as the Stars & Stripes-- and he still carries a Mexican bullet around with him. At present Captain Craige is in charge of the publicity bureau of the Marine Corps."

Life of Edward William Lane (1877) by Stanley Poole-Lane

 image info - Edward William Lane by Richard James Lane, plaster statue, 1829, 37 1/2 in. (953 mm) high, Given by the sitter's grand nephew, Stanley Lane Poole, 1893, NPG 940 - http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitLarge/mw03752/Edward-William-Lane

Here, for free, in many formats to download or read online, is the book Life of Edward William Lane (1877) - https://archive.org/details/lifeedwardwilli00lanegoog

The biography was written by Lane's nephew Stanley Poole-Lane, a professor and "Egyptologist" who spent a great deal of time editing and re-publishing his uncle's works, including several editions of Lane's Arabian Nights.

The biography pays particular attention to Lane's time in Egypt and his Arabic related publications and research.

more reading -

Stanley Poole-Lane at Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Lane-Poole

Arabian Nights Village - Abu Dhabi

A new hotel resort has opened in Abu Dhabi, UAE, called "Arabian Nights Village".  Promising an authentic heritage experience in the desert, while maintaining plush Gulf standards, the hotel does not allow phones or Internet except for emergency use.

Here's their website - http://arabiannightsvillage.com/index.php

and from Gulfbusiness.com - (gulfbusiness.com/2013/10/abu-dhabi-launches-arabian-nights-village)

The Arabian Nights Village desert retreat has opened, designed to attract more cultural tourists to Abu Dhabi.

Spanning 85,000sqm, the Al Khatem plot is the size of 12 football pitches and aims to “raise the bar” on traditional overnight desert accommodation.

Conceived to give guests an insight into desert and traditional Emirati life, the Arabian Nights Village contains 30 double rooms, five one-bedroom suites and a three-bedroom suite, set across four themes: Bayt Al Shaaer (The Woven House), Bayt Al Bahar (House of the Sea), Bayt Al Bar (Desert Home) and Al Manhal Fort Tower.

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Prices for two sharing a heritage room are Dhs1,250 ($340) for a night inclusive of service charges and tourism fees and include breakfast and dinner and most activities. The tower suites cost Dhs3,750 (US$1,000) and holds six guests.

Activities include dune bashing, quad biking, sand surfing and sledding, camel riding, falconry, henna painting and Emirati camel farm visits.  The village is also offering corporate packages and events.

Harem Girls and Camel Races - Sarah McCormick Seekatz

Someone posted about this article on the blog, it's a very interesting history of the "Date" festival that takes place every year in Indio, California.

The author is also doing her PhD at UC Riverside in History on Orientalist motifs in Southern Californian culture - very cool!  I'm glad she is because the date festival, the date farms in places like Mecca, California, and the very interesting connections to the "Middle East" are all things near and dear to me and my research interests too.  Plus a regular trip to Indio is always a good thing, date festival or tamale festival or whatever.

In any event, the article is "Harem Girls and Camel Races:  Middle Eastern Fantasies in the Deserts of Southern California" by Sarah McCormick Seekatz, and it features a ton of great pictures, and you can read the whole thing here:

http://www.kcet.org/arts/artbound/counties/riverside/coachella-valley-middle-eastern-fantasies-desert.html

For more on the date festival and this blog, click the label marked "Date festival Indio" on the right side of the blog under labels.

Ron Goodwin - Music for an Arabian Night

 

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Ronald Alfred Goodwin (wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Goodwin) (17 February 1925 – 8 January 2003) was a British composer and conductor known for his film music. He scored over 70 films in a career lasting over fifty years. His most famous works included Where Eagles Dare, Battle of Britain, 633 Squadron and Operation Crossbow.

Someone posted the album on youtube:

 

Marina Warner’s Stranger Magic - rev. by Daily Beast

Here is a review of Marina Warner’s Stranger Magic, a new Nights book I recently mentioned. This review is from The Daily Beast and is written by English Professor Brad Gooch, well written for the most part (though is "Palestinian-Arab" really a necessary, if correct, adjective for Edward Said? Maybe the author meant "Palestinian-American," which Said was? Arab-American?), if a bit of a cursory overview of Warner's book.

I've excerpted some passages below, the entire review is here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/25/marina-warner-s-stranger-magic-reconsiders-the-arabian-nights.html

"Long before meta-fiction, blog fiction, expropriation, or hypertext, there was Shahrazad, the slinkiest, sexiest, most ineradicable trickster in global literature, telling stories every night towards the event horizon of 1001 Nights to distract her abusive husband, the Sultan, from his resolve to behead each of his wives for infidelity—while her sister curled beside them on the divan, like a kinky teleprompter, or laugh-sigh-gasp track. The result, Tales of a Thousand and One Nights, or Arabian Nights, as it became known after its first English translation, in 1706, kicked off a craze of Orientalism that morphed across supposedly rational Enlightenment Europe in spoofs, follies, turqueries, pantomimes, and lots of camping it up in djellaba, or lounging on “ottomans.” Some of its signature tales—Aladdin’s lamp, Sinbad’s voyage, or Ali Baba’s thieves—were likely only smuggled into the text later by French translator Antoine Galland, spun by him from mere parentheses of plot in the 14th-century Syrian manuscript he was busily mining."

"The jinni (Arabic for “genie” or “demon”) in the bottle of Warner’s book, both menacing and inspiring, is Palestinian-Arab Edward Said and his paradigm-shifting study Orientalism. When I was a student at Columbia in the late 1970s, I audited Said’s course. He was an academic rock star of the moment, wore elegant dark-blue suits to class; as a snarky student exercise I kept note of the number of times he used the word “power” in every lecture. Orientalism was the equivalent of an academic beach book during in the summer of 1979—a “cult bible,” says Warner. While Said didn’t take on the popularization of Arabian Nights directly, especially as triggered by the “lurid and archaizing” Victorian-era version of Sir Richard Burton, he did take on his ilk, exposing orientalist scholars, adventurers, and explorers as trading in stereotypes of Eastern lassitude, femininity, and deception that helped stoke a colonialist, imperialist agenda.

Enough decades have passed for these ideas to be run through the word processor again, and reconsidered. While Said did not deconstruct Arabian Nights directly, he did indict one of its translators, the English Arabist Edward W. Lane, for fostering prejudice. “Said’s furious polemic against Orientalism,” Warner writes, “has dominated perception of the Nights and related Orientalist literature until now.” She stops along her way to absolve this or that orientalist figure of heavy-handed motives, restoring the impulses of sheer infatuation and curiosity that motivated so many of these Arabophiles from Goethe to T.E. Lawrence to Sigmund Freud, with his divan of a psychoanalytic couch covered with oriental rugs and cushions for Shahrazadian talking cures. Warner trots out Edward Lane as Exhibit A of a “charmed encounter” with the Middle East. A sort of method scholar, Lane lived in Cairo, admittedly dressing in Mameluke robes, while translating the Koran, producing a monumental Arabic-English lexicon, as well as his annotated Nights (1839-41) in three illustrated volumes."

Stranger Magic: Charmed States & the Arabian Nights By Marina Warner Chatto

A new book has emerged from the UK, written by Marina Warner (http://www.marinawarner.com), a Professor at The University of Essex and noted author.

Below is a review from the Guardian. Here is a link to it: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/11/stranger-magic-marina-warner-review.

It's a big (400+ page) book, I'm looking forward to taking a look at it.

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"Stranger Magic by Marina Warner – review
Marina Warner has written a scholarly dissection of the Arabian Nights

• Robin Yassin-Kassab
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 11 November 2011 17.55 EST
•

The Arabian Nights constitute, in Marina Warner's words, "a polyvocal anthology of world myths, fables and fairytales". The antecedents of these Arab-Islamic texts (also known as The Thousand and One Nights and the Arabian Nights Entertainments) are Qur'anic, Biblical, Indian, Persian, Mesopotamian, Greek, Turkish and Egyptian. In them, oral and written traditions, poetry and prose, demotic folk tales and courtly high culture mutate and interpenetrate. In their long lifetime the Nights have influenced, among many others, Flaubert, Wilde, Márquez, Mahfouz, Elias Khoury, Douglas Fairbanks and the Ballets Russes.

The framing story, in which Shahrazad saves her life by telling King Shahryar tall tales, is only one such ransom recounted in the tales. More than simple entertainment, then: throughout these stories within stories, and stories about stories, narrative even claims for itself the power to defer death. Although oral versions of the Nights long percolated through Europe (elements turning up in Chaucer, Ariosto, Dante and Shakespeare), the tales were established in the mainstream of European popular and literary culture with Galland's early 18th-century French translation. Galland purged the eroticism and homosexuality, added tales from the dictation of a Lebanese friend, and perhaps invented the two best-known and seemingly most "Arabian" tales of all: "Aladdin and the Magic Lamp" and "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves".

Warner quotes Jorge Luis Borges (a guiding spirit in her book) approving this belle infidèle approach to translation. "I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else." It's this changing aspect of the Nights as a time-travelling, trans-civilisational cooperation that fascinates Warner. She sees in it "a unique key to the imaginary processes that govern the symbolism of magic, foreignness and mysterious power in modern culture".

Stranger Magic, influenced by the work of Edward Said, is an endeavour to uncover "a neglected story of reciprocity and exchange". One of Warner's central intentions is to show that while Christendom and Islam were politically and religiously in a state of hot or cold war, science, philosophy and art recognised no frontiers. Yet this openness closed somewhat from the Enlightenment on, when Europe sealed magic off from science, imagination from reason, and also east from west. The Enlightenment, of course, was the point at which the Nights was translated to such rapturous European reception, and not by accident. The "home-grown practice of, and belief in, magic was set aside to be replaced by foreign magic – stranger magic, much easier to disown, or otherwise hold in intellectual or political quarantine".

So to the orientalisms of Edward Lane and Richard Burton's English translations, which not only presented the medieval fantastic as a documentary resource for understanding the "unchanging" and now colonially subjected Arab culture of the 19th century, but also projected on to the exotic foreign screen fantasies and fears that would have been taboo in a domestic context. Burton famously re-sexualised the tales with his own copious notes on the east's supposed perversions.

Stranger Magic is an enormous work, 436 densely erudite and eclectic pages plus another hundred of glossaries and notes. In its relentless connecting up of diverse stories, from the Inferno to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, it's reminiscent of Christopher Booker's brick-sized Seven Basic Plots. Warner's chapters, allocated into five parts, are beautifully illustrated and interspersed with 15 tales concisely retold.

Part one focuses on the jinn (or genies) – who behave, like the Greek gods, badly, capriciously, illogically – and also on the figure of Solomon, a master of the jinn in his Islamic version, here located in the white wizard tradition somewhere between Gilgamesh, Merlin, Prospero and Gandalf. It includes one of the book's many delightful discoveries: a 14th-century Syrian treatise on the legal status of jinn-human marriages.

The second part attends to the Arab and European habit of attributing foreignness to evil magicians. These dark enchanters come from dark places (Africa and India) and profess dark (pre-Islamic) faiths. During the Enlightenment, black magic became inevitably dark skinned; necromancy became inseparable from "nigromancy".
Warner also examines how the stories "test the border between persons and things" and how severed heads that speak, books that kill and carpets which fly can be linked to the objects of our modern world – not only cinema's animations but also the prosthetic goods of everyday life, the designer labels, gadgets and vehicles by which we project and define our personalities.

Warner moves from considering the derivations and meanings of the word "talisman" to reflect on her own attachment to talismans in her Catholic girlhood (her personal appearances in the book are apt, easing the academic tone) before launching into a fascinating discussion of the talismanic properties of paper money.

There is much on writerly responses to the Nights, including Voltaire's contes, Goethe's "East-West Divan", and (a great chapter) the neglected Gothic novelist and Islamophile William Beckford. The book ends with an examination of flight, cinema, shadow play and Freud. Warner describes the Hampstead cave of wonders that was Freud's final consulting room, "a darkling mirror of the furnishings of his mind", and the iconic analytical couch draped in oriental cushions and rugs. Specifically a Ghashgha'i tribal rug, which leads by glorious digression to Mohsen Makhmalbaf's rug-themed Iranian film Gabbeh, and to a reminder that oriental rugs, the Nights and psychoanalysis are all narrative forms.

Stranger Magic is a scholarly work that often reads like a fireside conversation. It's encyclopediac, a book to be savoured in slices, yet (inevitably) it's easy to think of further potential topics – giants, for instance, or dervishes, or magical realism from the Arabs via La Mancha to the Latin American boom. But Warner's conclusion reminds us of her organising principle: the uses of enchantment to open new possibilities of thought and sympathy – the necessity of magic, especially in a self-consciously "rational", secular world.

•Robin Yassin-Kassab's The Road from Damascus is published by Penguin."