Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery: Iran’s Cinematic Archive

Abstract:

Bringing together cinema studies, Middle East studies, Black studies, and postcolonial theory, Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery explores African enslavement in the Indian Ocean through the revelatory and little-known history of Iranian cinema. It shows that Iranian film reveals a resistance to facticity representative of the history of African enslavement in the Indian Ocean and preserves the legacy of African slavery’s longue durée in ways that resist its overpowering erasure in the popular and historical imagination.

Bio:

Parisa Vaziri is an assistant professor of comparative literature at Cornell University. Her research and teaching interests explore critiques of history and the subject, as articulated primarily by black critical thought, poststructuralist theory, and film and media studies.