Slavery, From Sadi to Melville

Black people have been the other throughout history not only in Europe and America but also in Asia and particularly in the Middle East and the worst type of its projection has always been slavery. In this paper I am going to focus on the role and the representation of black slaves in two canonical and widely read texts, one of them from Iran written almost 800 years ago, and the other from America written in the 1850s. Sadi’s Gulistan or Rose Garden and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick are from different worlds but surprisingly they have points in common. I want to close-read tale number 7 of the first chapter of Sadi’s Gulistan - the manner of kings - and chapter 93 of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick-The Castaway- and study the meaning of race, racism and slavery in their societies and also compare the two writers’ point of view about these concepts.

Keywords:

Herman Melville , Moby-Dick , Sadi , Gulistan , Racism , Slavery , race.