Representing “Arabia” in the Long Eighteenth Century (ASECS Annual Conference, Baltimore, 2022)
This panel invites papers on eighteenth-century texts or visual art that engage with, provide accounts of, or create Orientalist fictions about “Arabia.” The growing interest in the Orient and orientalia fueled by eighteenth-century travelers to the Near East and by translations like Galland’s A Thousand and One Nights (1704-1717), rendered in English as the Arabian Nights Entertainments (1706-1721), produced a large corpus of works that often used “Arabia” as an umbrella term that described not one location, but many. How did these texts represent “Arabia” and the “Arabs” and what sets of images or cultural stereotypes about the place and its people emerged at the time?