On Advocating for Other Cultures: A Conversation with Somy Kim

Interview

Somy Kim is an associate teaching professor in Northeastern University’s Writing Program; she is also fluent in four languages, with a basic knowledge of two others. Unsurprisingly, her accounts of traveling after college are fascinating; her research, focusing on the essay film as a genre and its significance in the cultural history of the Middle East, especially Iran, is a penetrating exploration of film as a cultural object; and her face, as we try to find a table at Pavement Coffeehouse at 11 on a dreary Wednesday morning, is a little surprised.

“I didn’t expect it to be so crowded.”

Professor Kim is refreshingly honest about naïveté, and the role it has played in her studies and her travel—generally speaking, her encounters with cultural exchange. We manage to snag a table after a few minutes of waiting, and we are already deep into conversation. As a writing professor, she is very interested by the writing course that this interview is for, and we discuss the various ways to approach peer editing and the importance of an open and inviting classroom atmosphere, among other things, for twenty minutes before I start the recorder. All in all, we talk for about two hours and the conversation ranges over a wide spectrum of topics, from the evolution of her studies to the potential of film reviews as an instrument of social justice. I originally found Professor Kim through her work in Middle Eastern studies, but her experience studying and working with foreign cultures and cultural exchange is extensive and multifaceted.

I ask her how she gained this experience, because her academic resume doesn’t explain it all: she earned her BA in Linguistics from UCLA, paused for six years before receiving a Masters degree in English Literature from DePaul University, and then obtained a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Texas at Austin. At what point did the shift from linguistics student to expert in Iranian cinema occur?

I learn from Kim that Los Angeles is home to one of the largest Iranian/Persian diasporas in the world. During her time at UCLA, the Near East became a focus of her undergraduate career, but because UCLA had no study abroad program in Iran, she began learning Arabic in order to study abroad in Cairo. From there, she continued traveling, spending time in South Korea, Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, as well as returning to Egypt; during that six-month visit, the Iraq War began, illustrating visualization’s role in creating different perceptions of war in the Middle East and the US: “People were in the streets, going crazy on the TV 24/7 where images of bloody bodies… My mother and sister, I would call home and they were like, “We don’t see anything over here!” It’s such a very different experience.” She and her husband returned to the US from Cairo for his new job at DePaul, and after the birth of her first child, she began feeling restless and decided to take one course.

That one course turned into a Masters degree in English literature, but in her last semester, Kim took a course on postcolonial literature. As she says, “It was the first time I knew that we could study things that were not British and American literature. I didn’t know that.” Suddenly, Kim was able to study one of her long-time passions, film, using the critical theories and forms of narrative analysis she found in Comp. Lit.: “I actually did go from novels and poetry to writing about film because I felt more connected to the films. … As a person writing about other cultures, I felt I got an invitation to cinema.” The films were made for her, as a viewer, to watch.

She pauses to take a bite of her sandwich and I check to make sure the recorder is, in fact, still recording.

Now, Kim has a unique perspective to bring to the writing courses she teaches, a perspective informed by her experiences navigating other cultures. We discuss the issues she encounters studying, as she puts it in one of her papers, “a cinema replete with such culture-specific and historically laden allusions.” Clearly, one has to be an expert in the culture to address such a complex subject, but navigating that role when it comes to a foreign culture different from your own is a complicated undertaking. Recently, she has begun to recognize a kind of positivist attitude in her approach to film analysis: avoiding critique, and emphasizing praise and recognition, because of her position as a non-Iranian, as coming from a non-Middle Eastern background.

We also discuss the challenges that she faces in the classroom, especially how to approach and teach problematic, but seminal, subject material, like the film “Lawrence of Arabia.” Ultimately, it’s a question of how to effectively educate students from a wide variety of disciplines on in-depth engagement with culture and cultural products. Kim knows better than most, and tries to communicate to her students, that a film is a story, not a one-to-one relationship, and that by analyzing a film we are unpacking just one narrative about what it is to be.

As we bring our mugs back to the counter and head out the door, I am left with more questions than I arrived with, but also unquestionably more knowledge. Maybe, looking back on our conversation—especially the roles that naïveté and the desire to learn more play in gaining cultural knowledge and expertise—the two go hand-in-hand.

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