Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Parisa Vaziri. Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery: Iran’s Cinematic Archive. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023. 368 pp.

Review by Kaveh Askari  

17 October 2024

Parisa Vaziri’s compelling new book does not waste time with modest challenges. How does one approach the racial legacies of Indian Ocean slavery in Iran, already a tricky topic in Iranian studies, while questioning whether positive knowledge about these legacies is even possible?

A work on this subject that is committed to an ethics of emancipation requires, Vaziri argues, a radical skepticism of documentable history. In this point, the book is in good company. Recent books on neighboring regional media ecologies, on feminist historiography, or on invisible forms of labor have affirmed as foundational a relationship with the fragmented, unbalanced, nonextant, or otherwise incomplete document. Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery considers this relationship at its philosophical limit. That is, drawing from poststructuralist theory, it treats archival absence as a problem without a straightforward practical solution. Practical optimism for a method with which to grasp elusive empirical evidence could itself threaten to leave a faith in facticity unchecked.

The book’s multifaceted filmography gives Vaziri a way to think through this question of absence without delimiting a film movement or an oeuvre. It unsettles typical Iranian film chronologies by centering films released during both of the revolution’s adjacent decades, 1969–1989. It spans multiple styles, from pulpy thrillers to austere neorealist films, and it represents production contexts that differed dramatically due to varying levels of commercial viability and to shifts in support from sponsoring institutions. Certain directors stand out for their relevant preoccupations: Amir Naderi and Nasser Taghvai for their interest in port towns in the south that have long linked Iran to Indian Ocean trade, Bahram Beyzai and Farrokh Ghaffari for their interest in folkloric traditions such as African-Iranian zar ritual or siyah bazi (a tradition of blackface performance commonly constructed around eunuch stereotypes). The filmography does not offer a repository of representations or documentation from which to extract evidence. Vaziri turns to Iran’s cinematic archive not as something to be illustrated, canonized, described, or rendered with proof. Be the films documentary or fiction, be they Taghvai’s disenchanted reflections on consumerist modernity or Samuel Khachikian’s enchanted (reflective in their own way) spectacles of consumerism, the chapters explore how a film’s imaginary can be made to counter longstanding empirical erasures (and more recent disavowals) that have characterized formations of racial blackness in Iran. This conception of a cinematic archive offers a path to dissensus in evaluating whether positive historical knowledge can adequately engage the history of Indian Ocean slavery from the vantage of the Gulf.

Vaziri’s approach to the cinematic archive turns away from the pressure to seek disciplinary hospitality. She does not spend time replaying (as some of us have done) an introduction of Iranian cinema to our cross-disciplinary communities with each new article or book. Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery politely declines to reinvent the wheel. It thinks big, but it rejects a broad authoritative mode, a national-cinema frame, a consideration of a director’s corpus, or any argument that would have a handful of films stand in for a whole.

Instead, Vaziri takes a writer’s liberty in her chapters’ deep readings of non-exemplary elements of films. Are the scenes she explores in excess of the mechanisms of a film’s plot? In many cases, yes. Are they peripheral to a director’s primary thematic preoccupations? Sometimes, but they are not peripheral to the kinds of curiosity these films generate at a public screening. Program one of these films in a repertory cinema or at a film festival and see. Centrality to plot or oeuvre notwithstanding, elements such as the black ceramic figurine on a bar table in The Midnight Cry (dir. Samuel Khachikian, 1961), the zar sequence in Bashu, the Little Stranger (dir. Bahram Beizai, 1986), and the siyah bazi sequences in films by Ghaffari or Sardar Sager tend to command audience attention and discussion. Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery acknowledges this interest and rewards it with a singular consideration of the forms of understanding that can be opened up by such questioning.

The book’s work with contemporary theorizations of race, gender, and the human offers a fresh perspective for emerging scholars who might be hesitant to work with an archive that has tended to be protected as siloed knowledge. Its densely embedded citational structure is in sync with core texts offered in many PhD cohort seminars across North America. In opening a collection of Iranian films to these core texts, the book could serve as a model for how to do things with films that might not intuitively align with North American- or Atlantic-situated Black critical thought. For example, it takes an unflinching, but also playful, writer to bring critiques of creolization in Caribbean studies into conversation with critiques of syncretism and montage culture in Southwest Asia. It is no easy task to run against the grain of contexts that delimit fields: to destabilize the southern geographies of Iranian studies or to bridge methods for understanding the legacies of Atlantic slavery with those of the Indian Ocean. This kind of work stresses connection and what is possible when a field, be it a small field like Iranian studies or a larger (yet still underrepresented) field such as Indian Ocean studies, delays the tendency to turn in on itself.

Multiple audiences have been waiting for this book: in a range of fields, at film festivals, screening series, and in the seminar room. As preservation, translation, and curation efforts of these and related films expand, we will return to Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery’s elegant readings of non-exemplary elements that tend to activate audiences’ curiosity, to its theorization of the politics of nonfiction modernist film, and to its comparativist knack for unsettling configurations of academic turf and linking these films to driving questions in the humanities.