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

Iranian cinema preserves the legacy of African enslavement in the western Indian Ocean from antiquity to the nineteenth century, revealing how blackness complicates traditional understandings of history and culture. This book explores the politicized clash between commercial cinema and alternative filmmaking, highlighting the healing ritual zār and cinematic sīyāh bāzī. It reveals a singular mode of historicity, one of "absence," reflecting the relative dearth of archival information on Indian Ocean slavery.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 368 pages
Publication date: 26 December 2023
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press

From the East African and Red Sea coasts to the Persian Gulf ports of Bushihr, Kish, and Hurmuz, sailing and caravan networks supplied Iran and the surrounding regions with African slave labor from antiquity to the nineteenth century. This book reveals how Iranian cinema preserves the legacy of this vast and yet long-overlooked history that has come to be known as Indian Ocean slavery.

How does a focus on blackness complicate traditional understandings of history and culture? Parisa Vaziri addresses this question by looking at residues of the Indian Ocean slave trade in Iranian films from the second half of the twentieth century. Revealing the politicized clash between commercial cinema (filmmakers) and alternative filmmaking (the Iranian New Wave), she pays particular attention to the healing ritual zār, which is both an African slave descendent practice and a constitutive element of Iranian culture, as well as to cinematic sīyāh bāzī (Persian black play). Moving beyond other studies on Indian Ocean and trans-Saharan slavery, Vaziri highlights the crystallization of a singular mode of historicity within these cinematic examples—one of "absence" that reflects the relative dearth of archival information on the facts surrounding Indian Ocean slavery.

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.

Weight: 474g
Dimension: 139 x 215 x 22 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781517914752