Intro Section: How I Entered Arabic Studies

My engagement with Arabic studies began not through language alone, but through art. Encountering Shirin Neshat’s Rebellious Silence for the first time in my high school art history class, I felt an immediate and unexpected sense of recognition. Although I did not grow up in the Arabic world, the image’s layered contradictions—devotion and defiance, tradition and resistance—resonated deeply with me. The hijab, inscribed with a contemporary feminist poem, transforms the portrait into a visual dialogue about identity, history, and power within Arabic culture.

This sense of duality felt familiar. Growing up in Shanghai, I was surrounded by similar contrasts: colonial architecture beside glass skyscrapers, local dialects spoken alongside global languages. Seeing these same tensions reflected in Arabic art drew me toward the region’s history and culture, and toward the idea of art as a language capable of expressing complex social realities.

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Academic Exploration: From Art to Film

Motivated to explore Arabic culture more deeply, I attended the Carleton College Summer Program, where I studied Arabic history, literature, visual arts, and film in an interdisciplinary setting. I also completed a literature critique on the book Zayni Barakat. During a unit on Arabic cinema, I became particularly interested in how filmmakers use artistic elements—especially music—to communicate social and gendered expectations.

One Egyptian film’s use of traditional music and dance to expose gender norms during the Mamluk period stood out to me. Once again, I encountered the same dynamic that first drew me to Rebellious Silence: art functioning as a vehicle for social critique rather than aesthetic decoration. This realization pushed me toward film analysis as a way to study culture, history, and politics simultaneously.

 

Research Focus: Jazz, Film, and Cultural Memory

Building on this interest, I pursued an independent research project on the role of jazz in Arabic—specifically Lebanese—films from the wartime and post-war eras. Combining film analysis with musicological analysis, I examined how jazz functions as a cultural expression of fragmentation, nostalgia, and collective memory in films such as Civilisées (1999) and Falafel (2006).

Jazz’s improvisational structure and hybrid nature—blending Western forms with Arabic instruments and rhythms—mirrors Lebanon’s complex cultural identity. In my research, I argue that jazz in these films does more than underscore emotion: it reflects how Lebanese society processes war, normalizes violence, and negotiates post-war identity through irony, numbness, and nostalgia.

 

Interdisciplinary Connections

While researching Lebanese cinema, I began noticing strong parallels with other academic interests of mine. Concepts from psychology—particularly collective memory, which I studied in AP Psychology—helped me understand how film and music preserve shared experiences of trauma. Inspired by this connection, I curated a photography exhibition focused on urban collective memory, featuring photographs I took of city spaces shaped by historical layers and lived experiences.

At that moment, everything felt connected: Arabic culture, film, music, psychology, photography, Shanghai, and my hometown of Wenzhou. Film became the medium that allowed these interests to converge—an interdisciplinary language capable of bridging cultures, disciplines, and identities.