The English “Harem” from the Sixteenth through the Twentieth-First Century: A Counter-Orientalist Philological Approach
Addressing transtemporal and transcultural interactions between “the West” and “the Islamic World” rooted in the early modern period (1500–1800), with particular attention to women’s cultural agency, this talk delves into the history of the Arabic word “ḥarām” as it was introduced into the English language and reconfigured as “the harem” to support the emergent Anglocentric discourse of empire. It divides into three parts: the first focuses on context and method via Edward Said’s “Return to Philology” (2003); the second analyzes the word “harem” and how it was adopted into the English language during the early modern period; and the third examines Fatema Mernissi’s Islamic feminist remediation of the term in Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems (2001). It concludes with reflections on Scheherazade/ Shahrazad from 1001 Nights more broadly, and how this iconic figure has been mobilized for a counter-orientalist philology from the early modern period to the present.
Bernadette Andrea is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is also affiliated with the Center for Middle East Studies and the Department of Feminist Studies. She is the author of The Lives of Girls and Women from the Islamic World in Early Modern British Literature and Culture (2017) and Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (2007). Her edited books include Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World (2019); English Women Staging Islam, 1696–1707 (2012); and Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds (2011). She has served as an editor of Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal (2017–2024), and as the President of the Shakespeare Association of America (2022–2023).