Between Shifting Place and Shifting Privilege: A Comparative Study of World, Other, and Self in Hikayat Tamīm Al-Dāri and Barbie (2023)

Hikayat Tamīm Al-Dāri and Barbie (2023) are two narratives from two different parts of the world but have similarities and uniqueness in the aspect of the journey of their characters. The first presents the main characters who travel from the world to the realm of the jinn, while the second travels from a world dominated by women to a patriarchal world. As travel writings that utilize movement through space, it is interesting to describe how the two narratives negotiate between the self, the other, and the world being reported. So far, previous research has been limited to the conception of jinn and gender and sexuality analysis, none have studied it by combining travel literature theory and comparative literature methods. Therefore, this study aims to examine the travel narratives in the two works related to Carl Thompson's travel literature theory. The results of the study show that the foreign world, the strange other, is related to self-formation. The self in both works can be influenced and form a romantic self, or unaffected and form a Cartesian self