Performing in a Dominated Body: Redefining The One Thousand and One Nights' Narrative Identity through Praxis
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El Ansary, Chirine. 2024. Performing in a Dominated Body: Redefining The One Thousand and One Nights' Narrative Identity through Praxis. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]
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Text (Performing in a Dominated Body: Redefining The One Thousand and One Nights' Narrative Identity through Praxis)
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Abstract or Description
My practice-as-research seeks to demonstrate how my journey as an Egyptian woman and a storyteller specialising in The One Thousand and One Nights has led me to question the mechanisms by which hegemonic systems confiscate individual and collective imaginaries. The circumstances of my childhood combined with my practice have caused me to speculate on the devastating and perduring consequences of such confiscation and have urged me to investigate decolonising strategies for practical and theoretical readjustment. I believe that the history of The One Thousand and One Nights' textual formation and dissemination, as well as the text's structure, can present contemporary Egyptian performers with an invaluable base from which to develop new — politically sound, contextually relevant — performing methodologies. However, I argue that such a potential remains insufficiently explored. I contend that the reason for that lacuna is the orientalist scholarly tendency (Said, 1978) to study the story collection from the perspective of their printed versions, as a literary text with a fixed identity. My thesis is an investigation of the embodied knowledge of The One Thousand and One Nights I have acquired through performance. It reveals how hearing the stories as a child and later performing material derived from the story collection has made me question its identity. Inspired by practice, I suggest that the way The One Thousand and One Nights permeated — and were permeated by — Egypt's sociocultural fabric reveals the fundamental function storytelling held in maintaining the coherence of Egyptian society through what Cornelius Castoriadis has defined as “the imaginary institution of society” (1975). Within the context of my research, storytelling is to be understood as the oral transmission of a narrative by a single performer in the physical presence of an audience, whether this transmission is taking place within a professional or household context.
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Item Type: |
Thesis (Doctoral) |
| Identification Number (DOI): |
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| Keywords: |
Storytelling, Performance, Performing Arts, oral culture, Egypt, Middle East, Liminality, decolonising methodologies, Colonialism, The One Thousand and One Nights, Transmission, Practice-as-research, Reminiscence, Imaginary Institution of society, Imagination, Imaginal, The Arabian Nights, Deconstruction, Epistemological obstacles, Egyptian Feminism, Cairo |
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| Date: |
31 May 2024 |
| Item ID: |
37214 |
| Date Deposited: |
04 Jul 2024 16:07 |
| Last Modified: |
04 Jul 2024 16:13 |
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URI: |
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