Hello! Feel free to ignore this if you're tired of speaking about the MV, but I was wondering if it's okay for KPop groups to be using the 1001 nights stories as aesthetic inspiration for their MVs, like, isn't that what people find offensive? Using the culture as just an aesthetic? I know the stories aren't Islamic, so I'm speaking from a cultural view.
“long ago, during the time of the sassanid dynasty, in the peninsula of india and china were two kings who were brothers.”
this is the opening frame tale of shahrazad and shahriyar, the two main characters in a thousand and one nights. shahriyar is said to be the king of india and china. (x)
during the planning of the remake of aladdin, people were having conversations on who aladdin “belongs” to and who should be cast for the role: someone not only from the middle east per se but specifically from the levant (lebanon, syria, jordan, palestine) (so not even iraq or egypt like mena massoud who was eventually cast for the role), south asian, or chinese. because there is actually a history of aladdin, the character, being “chinese,” because in the original story in a thousand and one nights, aladdin takes place in china.
these are depictions of arabian nights. on the left, aladdin is on his way to the sultan’s palace. on the right, aladdin and the princess badr al-budur. (also from the same article, “who was the ‘real aladdin? from chinese to arab in 300 years”)
from “who ‘wrote aladdin? the forgotten syrian storyteller”:
The 1001 Nights has a pretty remarkable genealogy. Our oldest documentation of it is an Arabic papyrus from Egypt, reused as scrap with inscriptions dated 879 CE. There was an earlier Persian book called Hazār afsāna (A Thousand Stories) that did not survive. But key elements of the frame story of Shahriyar and Shahrazad were already common in Pali and Sanskrit texts from ancient India, while another Arabic book called One Hundred and One Nights has an alternate version also found in a third-century Chinese Buddhist text of the Tripiṭaka.
i mentioned in my previous ask that a thousand and one nights is one of the most prolific pieces of literature in the world. it is literally global literature that takes its shape from many transregional interpretations from all the way “west” in pre-islamic arabia and sassanian persia all the way east into the qing dynasty which had control over korea at a few points in its dynastic legacy.
my argument from the beginning of this conversation is that you cannot box these cultural narratives that literally bleed into each other and have such a rich history and genealogy, not in spite of, but because of the way orality functions in shaping these literary narratives.
my point is that it’s hard to definitively put the brakes on 1001 nights and say that people outside of the middle east or south asia don’t have “claim” to the story. i’m not saying that kpop can appropriate it, but i think it depends on how it’s being done. this is very similar to the point i make on my post about the “appropriation” of bruce lee in the kick it music video, who is a global figure in many ways to many people for many reasons. nct could have gone all out and appropriated bruce lee and a lot of the chinese elements they incorporated, but they incorporated those elements in a nonspecific way. likewise, in the case of this mv, things are so nonspecific, which, in turn, has allowed so many different people to make claims on the aesthetics of the mv. the aesthetics are reminiscent as west as spain all the way “east.”
there is also an element of “camp” that is involved in both this mv and misfit, that my good friend iman brought up, and i think it’s a really important point to consider when you look at the way both were filmed and how the sets/outfits were configured. camp, according to iman, is meant to be a little over the top and a little playful, without being offensively done. think ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical and also playing with effeminate behavior (ie: think about that one scene where they’re playing with putting flowers in each other’s hair, which i just think is so interesting in this entire conversation)
the reason this music video is even more interesting is that it’s not only theatrical and playful, but it derives is theatrics and playfulness from the way 1001 nights is theatrical and playful in and of itself. if you read 1001 nights, you’ll understand what i’m talking about. there are many performances in the story itself that lends themselves to absurdity, even though there are very complex and serious elements embedded throughout. for example, the very concept of genies in that story (and in pre-islamic/sassanian folklore) is meant to represent trickery and michief, which is the whole reason nct go with the trope, not simply for aesthetic purposes, but for what these concepts symbolize and give meaning to the actual song itself, which is meant to be fun, absurd, mischievous, and alluring.
i appreciate that you’re not talking about an islamic perspective, but many people are conflating the two concepts (religion and culture) together, so it makes a difficult task to untangle and analyze this issue properly, so i think “islam” in this sense plays a really important conversation as far as “aesthetics” are concerned. so if i’m going to be honest, those who participate in projecting an image of nct sitting in a “mosque” or misappropriating what the story of a thousand and one nights means to them (as an exclusively middle eastern/arab story), then they are fetishizing/orientalizing what islam/1001 nights seems to THEM. those who are conflating the religion with the elements from 1001 nights, are pointblank essentializing their view of islam and the story as an exotic static aesthetic through a reductive analysis of men wearing black robes circling fire (some derogatorily and offensively equating it to islamic mysticism—they are literally using the word “mysticism” in a classic orientalist way and equating it to the fire scene that takes place in the mv. what the fuck lol), sitting on “eastern” rugs in a “mosque” in “prayer,” and being genies. if people choose to see “islam” or “middle eastern culture” through that imagery, that is their orientalist understanding of what islam and this “culture” is, not what it actually is, and in fact does the harm people think the mv is doing
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