Identity Affirmation and Cultural Preservation: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of I am From Palestine

Abstract

This study investigates how identity affirmation and cultural preservation take place in the Award winning animated short film I Am From Palestine (2023). In this film, the protagonist, Saamidah, a young Palestinian-American, experiences identity confusion when she realizes that Palestine is absent from her classroom map. She finds her identity in question. In the following scenes, through various modes, she affirmed her identity. Multimodal Discourse analysis and social semiotics theory of meaning-making by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen has been employed to explore how visual, linguistic, aural, and symbolic modes combine to put Palestinian identity in question first and then to restore it, linking it to cultural preservation for diasporic children. Semiotic features are prevalent in the film including symbolic imagery, narrative shifts, cultural motifs and emotional sketching as consistent patterns in the film. Future studies can be done on this movie from political signaling perspective