2019/01/01 by Christine Chism · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies #Global Maritime and Colonial Histories #Anthropological Studies and Insights
paper · doi:10.1353/dph.2019.0018
openalex publication_date 2019/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
This article tracks the global trajectories of a tale of a scholarly slave girl (her name in Arabic is Tawaddud) who wins a knowledge contest over the greatest scholars of her time. This essay investigates what made the tale so gripping to its medieval readers and translators: its uncoupling of knowledge from mastery. I use Deleuze's and DeLanda's discussions of assemblage theory to consider how Arabic versions of the tale link heterogeneous fields and genres of knowledge into a fantasy of feminine, enslaved omnicompetence, and also how the tales' global transmigrations create a network of multifaceted and larger-than-Eurocentric research, informed but not deliminated by colonialism and decolonization.