The Mirror of Society: Folktales, Power Dynamics, and Cultural Resistance

Abstract

This article investigates the role of Arab folktales as dynamic social mirrors that reflect, negotiate, and contest the power structures of the societies from which they emerge. Drawing upon the foundational scholarship of Arab folklorists and literary critics, the study argues that the folktale tradition is not a passive repository of cultural memory but an active, contested discursive space in which marginalized communities articulate resistance to hegemonic authority. Through close analysis of recurring narrative archetypes ‒ the cunning trickster, the persecuted heroine, the wise fool, and the suffering poor ‒ this article demonstrates that folk narratives operate on two simultaneous registers: the manifest, which reproduces socially sanctioned moral codes, and the latent, which subverts, satirizes, and undermines dominant ideological formations. The article further examines how colonial and patriarchal power dynamics are encoded in the symbolic grammar of Arab folk narrative, and how subaltern communities deploy oral tradition as a counter-hegemonic practice. Attention is paid to the gendered dimensions of narrative agency, the encoding of class conflict, and the postcolonial uses of folklore as a site of cultural self-affirmation. The study concludes that Arab folktales constitute a sophisticated epistemological tradition whose political dimensions have been systematically undervalued by both classical and modern Arab literary criticism.