Pan-Arabism: A Social Median Perspective
2020
Pan-Arabism: A Social Median Perspective
Featuring Aesha Hussein, Hekam Al Meqdad and Hamad Al-Amari.
Created by Ashraful Haque, Faizullah Javed and Saif Al-Solaiti.
This short film considers what Pan-Arabism means today, how this can be interpreted via social media in the region and west, and interviewees ideas of a possible ‘median’ perspective somewhere between the two.
Pan-Arabism promoted the cultural and political unity of Arab peoples, an ideology popular from the late nineteenth century. Part of its success and longevity as a movement has been through taking on different cultural and political forms, remaining highly influential until the 1970s. Once pervasive and transnational, Pan-Arabism fragmented as it took on different meanings in successive decades and as regionalization gave way to globalization.
From January–March 2020, the Northwestern Qatar course The Globalization of Culture taught by Larissa Buchholz collaborated with The Media Majlis exhibition From Visionaries to Vloggers: media revolutions in the Middle East. Students were guided by their own inspiration and self-learning to pursue a class project to consider examples of Pan-Arabism from the exhibition, and re-frame them in discussions set in a global context. The course syllabus was shaped through relevant theoretical readings, media content and time in the exhibition, where the class considered cultural production and identities in a global context and how social, cultural and symbolic forces influence our more globalized world. Students created projects ranging from explorations of cultural fusion through food (as ‘Pancake Arabism’), feminism in Qatar through local, regional and global lenses, and created blogs that surveyed social media to analyze how it contributed to identity formation.
The museum selected this project for inclusion in Explore Content, a filmed discussion that explores personal reflections about Pan-Arabism and social media perspectives featuring students and Qatar-based vlogger Hamad Al-Amari. Hamad Al-Amari is the face of Qatar-based YouTube channel Klmt Ras, which was explored in the From Visionaries to Vloggers exhibition, in a discussion dissecting how satire has allowed vloggers to play with regional stereotypes.