ABSTRACT: The term Arabesque has often been used as a verbal shorthand for an ornate pattern of interlaced flowers, leaves, or animal motifs. This essay attempts to retrace a longer affective history of the Arabesque in a contemporary... more
ABSTRACT: The term Arabesque has often been used as a verbal shorthand for an ornate pattern of interlaced flowers, leaves, or animal motifs. This essay attempts to retrace a longer affective history of the Arabesque in a contemporary Perso-Arabic context, made possible by the emergence of the cinema. Paying particular attention to trade routes that developed between Bombay, Persia, and the Middle East, it makes a polemical case for the long history of the Arabesque as a repertoire of Persianate or brown cultural sounds, images, tales, or motifs that circulate in the Global South and thrive by competing with or appropriating tropes from Western Orientalism. I argue that the mobility of the cinema across India, Iran inaugurated systems of cultural exchange and collaboration that went beyond the mere figural understanding of the Arabesque. Sound cinemaand, more recently, digital media formats are capable of expanding the frontiers of the Arabesque in unprecedented ways, allowing for new forms of play with physical space, as well as aural and temporal articulations of long-shared Persianate idioms addressed to aglobal collective imagined as brown.
