Summary

The intellectual discipline of orality and literacy studies has moved beyond a binary approach to entertain the possibility of multiple oralities and literacies. This multisided approach emphasizes the considerable overlap between orality and literacy, centering the notion of transitional literature: practices of “orature” (oral literature) characterized by the interplay of oral composition and writing technologies, extemporized performance, and stable texts. Given the coexistence of vibrant popular poetic traditions with written practices and the text concept in the Arabian Peninsula and Yemen for nearly two millennia, the analysis of those traditions offers new insights into the concept of transitional literatures. The Arabian Peninsula witnessed the first attestations of Arabic poetry: the pre-Islamic qaṣīdahs, which are preserved as written texts yet embody an oral imaginary. From the 8th century ce onward, critical assessment began to favor literary Arabic poetry with its sophisticated, cosmopolitan stylings. Poetry perceived as rural, noncosmopolitan, and oral—while very much a part of the cultural landscape—was disregarded in the critical corpus and remained virtually undocumented until the 20th century. The 20th century witnessed a reassessment of folk poetry and poetic traditions from Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula; folk poetry that had been formerly ignored was documented in Arabic and non-Arabic scholarship. As that scholarship increasingly demonstrates, Arabian and Yemeni rural folk poetry is not the product of a primary oral culture but, rather, incorporates elements of orality and written culture to appeal to different sources of social and political authority.