ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the dislocation of folktales and fairy tales by asking: “Where do fairy tales belong?” It discusses questions of “belonging” as they relate to folktales and fairy tales. The chapter examines paratextual strategies that three late twentieth-century translations of Arab tales use to position themselves for what Robert Escarpit has called an “alien public,” an audience comprised of readers who “do not have direct access to the work” or its “community of assumptions”. It explores how the constructedness of these English-language collections helps to negotiate the dichotomy of global and local belonging and conceptualize what globalization requires of contemporary folktale and fairy-tale scholarship. The three Arab folktale collections were issued by North American publishers between 1986 and 1998 for an English-speaking audience: Inea Bushnaq’s Pantheon edition of Arab Folktales; Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana’s Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales; and Raphael Patai’s Arab Folktales from Palestine and Israel.
