Thomas Dolan: I’m Going to Teach You How to Understand the World
By: Vereena Bishoy Boules
@vereena_bishoy
What do you get when you mix the love of analyzing music videos, with the indulgence of the academic works of Edward Said?
You get a chapter in a dissertation dedicated to Shakira’s perceived identity by the East and West, written and presented by Thomas Simsarian Dolan.
Coming from a rich multicultural background, Dolan arrives at AUC as a visiting professor, offering two history courses this spring and summer semesters under the US Fulbright Scholarship.
The Caravan’s Vereena Bishoy recently sat down with Dolan to find out more about his passion for the Middle East.
The Caravan: Where did the interest in Middle Eastern Studies come from?
So, my mom was Armenian. We’re from Eastern Anatolia in Syria and, I think there are so many different ways that people identify, but certainly, my family identified as Middle Eastern. We have family in Istanbul and we have family in Beirut, and a great grandfather who grew up in Cairo, and I still have cousins here in Heliopolis. So in some ways, the Middle East was always on my radar. I was born in Bermuda, I grew up in South Florida, but the Middle East was always a part of my imaginaries and my understanding of my place in the world. So that’s the kind of the first anchor I think.
The second kind of thing was, the things that I saw in popular culture are the ways that people interpreted the Middle East and its identities. It didn’t match up with what I was hearing at home or what my own sense of the world was. So I think it had to do with this moment, kind of in American history, and geopolitics.
In the course of my childhood, we had the first Gulf War and then, as I started college, and this will age me, unfortunately, but 9/11 happened, and then we saw the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and, throughout the 80s 90s, and knots, the Middle East, and its people’s remain, again, in some ways, so central to Americans understanding of the US in relation to the rest of the world. I felt confused, frustrated, and sort of pulled to try to make sense of these differences, how there was this huge disparity between what I understood of the Middle East versus what the broader American society thought of the Middle East.
My dissertation is a series of biographies of people from the Middle East, again broadly defined in the West. So, the first figure, Calouste Gulbenkian an Ottoman Armenian oil magnate, the second Alyia Hassan who was born to Lebanese Sunni homesteaders in South Dakota, in 1910. The third chapter, Edward Said, and the final chapter on Shakira, Lebanese Colombian global superstar. I bring that up because of the way that I got into these questions of identity and the very different ways that these people were interpreted across their lives.
For example, how Shakira is interpreted in Barranquilla, where she’s from, which has the largest Arab diaspora community in Colombia, in which the carnival queen is Palestinian Colombian, the mayor is Lebanese Colombian, the senators are Syrian or Lebanese Colombians.To be Arab is such a visible thing. But in the United States, and a student said this when I showed her an image of Shakira as a kid at Carnival, “But she’s blonde?” She comes to the states and suddenly she is blonde and is interpreted as Latina, this is it.
How have your studies impacted your perception of the world?
That’s a hard question. I used to perform, I love the arts and culture, this is my real passion, my real first love. So I kind of found my way back into academia to try to make sense of these questions because I couldn’t leave, they bugged me, or they were too juicy, too problematic to leave behind. So what historians at their best do is, understand the world and gain a better sense of how the world is as it is. And so I think that’s something that’s changed my understanding of the world.
Maybe first would be that identities are always in flux. There’s no such thing as a singular identity. There’s no such thing as the archetypical, Egyptian, Arab, Armenian, American. These things don’t actually exist like people negotiate these identities, have agency, and make decisions about what identities they relate to, how they want to uplift certain identities, or what are the proper terms and bounds of these identities constantly across our lives. So I think that’s one thing which my studies have really driven home is that as human beings, we are constantly making our way in the world, and trying to build lives that are ideally, satisfying, safe, give us dignity, give us rights, and identity is just a part of that. The narratives that we build about ourselves, about our identities, about our place in the world, where we belong, are constantly negotiated, are constantly in flux, that can be deeply unsettling and scary for a lot of people. But I think that, especially in a moment where globalization is so clear, and these processes are not new.
This is part of what I’m teaching in my other course, on Arab American memoir. The first memoir that we read is about a Chaldean priest from Baghdad who goes to Peru in 1620. So this is another era of globalization. But I think in this current moment, it’s hard not to understand our identities as multiple or in relation to other places, and transnational, international, global, whatever.
You briefly mentioned it at the beginning but could you tell us more about what brought you to Egypt and AUC?
A few things. On the simplest level, I saw that Fulbright has a position for a US scholar to come and teach at AUC; it had historically been an American Studies. So I thought, oh, this is perfect, this is exactly what my work does. To come here, to teach here, and to learn from my students really kind of embodies the mixed material, the sort of politics that I believe in, and particularly connecting disciplines and connecting places. So there was a certain kind of sympathetic ideological reason that I wanted to come here.
Another reason, as I mentioned, is that I do have family here. So my great grandfather, Nishan, grows up here prior to the genocide, and actually moves back and forth between the US and Egypt. He wanted to marry an Egyptian but then his mom says, “No, no, no, you have to marry the girl from the village who was Armenian especially after the genocide as people consolidate Armenian communities.[He] ends up going to the States but throughout his life [he] kind of laments leaving Egypt. This is the pro-Egyptian moment, so everyone should feel very proud. Parts of my family really did regret leaving Egypt, and he [left] before the citizenship law in the 20s.
What courses are you currently offering and are going to offer?
Great, so I currently have two classes. One, a history of popular culture and music. And so in this class, we’re looking at the emergence of kinds of mass media technologies, like film and radio and television and the internet and social media, and kind of tracing across the 20th century, most of the 20th century. Where do these technologies emerge? How are they harnessed? What kind of culture do they produce? And how are that culture and music a way to think about some of the questions we’ve mentioned, identity ideology, the nation, and imperialism?
It is an exciting class and I think fun and that we get to watch music videos, and movies and things that I love, but really interrogate them seriously, as a historical archive, as sites of meaning, making, as objects that really do help us make sense of the world and help us make sense of ourselves. Even though we don’t often think of a music video as being a place where we’re thinking about gender, nationalism, or musical forms. So that’s the first class.
The second one is an upper-level seminar on Arab American autobiography. So I noticed in my research for my dissertation, research in general memoir, and writing these autobiographies is a really common genre among people in the diaspora, especially people coming from the Middle East. And so, I wanted to offer this class as a way to think about identity and really kind of dig into these memoirs in a way that I hadn’t seriously before. And I also wanted, frankly, to dig into it with a group of Egyptian students, who have a different perspective and will be able to help me and stretch my thinking in terms of, okay, I can tell you a lot about the history of like Arab immigration to the states, and the ways in which Arab identities have been formed in the US, there’s not one, there are multiple identities. But I thought it was really provocative and exciting to teach this class here.
As for this summer, we’ve not entirely nailed down what I’ll be offering, but I imagine I’ll be offering some kind of iteration of those classes.
You may have mentioned this already in your response to the question prior but, what would students benefit from taking one of these courses?
I’m going to teach you how to understand the world. I mean, I can have a little bit of an ego around these classes. No, but in seriousness, I think that the biggest kind of insights in the pop culture and music class, and this is very, very much a part of my own research, and I mentioned, the research that I’ve done on Shakira, where I’m interested in looking at newspapers, popular reception and music videos in Latin America, in the United States in the Middle East or North Africa, to really connect these sites, but, but more importantly, to treat culture and music, as legitimate as real places where people as I said, like, make meaning… So I think that the key takeaway in this class would be, I want students to kind of turn a critical eye on culture and music, things that we’d love, which I love. I want to be clear. I love music videos. I’m totally dorky. I spent hours watching music videos and something that makes me happy.
But I want to also then in the process of watching these to be thinking about, okay, but what is this music video teaching us about gender or race? Or what is it referencing?
In the memoir class, we get a much more challenging class, much more reading. And some of the works are really quite difficult and that they are hundreds of years old, and somewhat inaccessible. But I want students to also consider questions around ideology and identity. I’ve chosen these words carefully, they are challenging, but they are really, really illuminating in terms of a can kind of major global processes, but especially how people construct their identities and why they construct certain narratives. So I want this to be a space where students really develop close reading skills and critical analytical skills around memoir around identity, and around why people are crafting and claiming certain identities in certain time periods. And we’ll see it in the coming weeks. Spoiler alert for students, these biographies or autobiographies, pardon me, do not agree with one another. Right, like we’re reading in the next two weeks, I’m Laila Ahmed and Edward Said writing about Egypt and Cairo, and take very, very different perspectives. So I want students to kind of think about how to analyze texts, but also how to become comfortable with these sorts of contradictions in the construction of identity and the construction of literary works that are about fundamentally the self.
Okay, onto getting to know you a bit better, you mentioned that you were into performing and the arts. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?
Okay, gosh, this is so funny and in some ways, it’s actually the first thing that came to mind to explain this is very much tied to what we’re discussing. So as a child, as a three-year-old, or four-year-old, or three and a half, or something like that, I got on the table at a Denny’s, like the whatever diner chain and sang ‘Born in the USA.’ Ironic, for several reasons that I was not born in the USA, first of all, so questions of identity and inclusion already haunting me as a three-year-old. But I mean, it’s kind of a joke, but we are taught things about who we are really, really early on, and kids absorb everything, so it absorbs something. The second irony, is I don’t like Bruce Springsteen. Bruce Springsteen was one of my mom’s favorite singers. He’s from Jersey, she’s from Jersey, like, she loved this person, I kind of like, hated him, probably as a kid to be Freudian about it, because I was jealous of the [fact] he got my mother’s attention, not me, I’m the oldest boy like, I have to be like the Prince. I forget if they call Bruce Springsteen, the prince or the king or something like that.
But yes, I’ve always loved performing, and I’ve always loved to sing, I’m very, very fortunate to remain connected to performing, and I’ve done a lot of work around representation, particularly MENA, Middle Eastern, and North African representation in Theatre, in Hollywood, as well as in music. And it’s been a really gratifying way for me to use my scholarship to talk about and explain that it really does matter when you represent the MENA region and its peoples in like problematic ways. But also, we need to think about how to create more opportunities for people who identify as a MENA, especially in film, TV, and theater, so I’m still kind of involved in performing whatever I can. Although, my focus is mostly now academic. I could talk all day about performance. I really, really do love that world.
Last but not least, since you are a history professor and a historian, what period would you have loved or wanted to live in?
Oh, God, this is so embarrassing. Maybe I want to live in like, Versailles, or Louis the 14th’s France. But it’s funny now; historical dramas are such a thing…It’s really a genre that people are kind of obsessed with. And it’s really easy to like, romanticize these eras, you’re like, oh, everything was so amazing. Like, at Versailles, 85% of the country were peasants living in mud; I’m not going to romanticize that. Because, like, I assume that I would have been like the King of France, right, which is not real.
I sort of wish I could have seen, for example, what Cairo was like in 1900. So for a personal answer, I guess I’m like, “Yes, I want to be the king of France, in 1680.” But on the other hand, I’m like, “Well, for my research, I wish I could see what it was like 100 years ago here. Those are my kind of instincts. Maybe the 1920s. New York. Like lots of partying and music, it seems like a fun time to be alive.
