Maryam Khakipour’s 2004 The Joymakers and its 2008 sequel Shadi form an exemplary site for examin... more Maryam Khakipour’s 2004 The Joymakers and its 2008 sequel Shadi form an exemplary site for examining the dissemination and translation of Persian blackface across time, space, and media. The transmediality of sīyāh bāzī reveals a universal familiarity with the practice of blackface comedy that disrupts commonplace assumptions about its geographical and historical itinerary.
The Holocaust serves as a foundational critical resource in postwar philosophy. Interventions int... more The Holocaust serves as a foundational critical resource in postwar philosophy. Interventions into the logic of its exemplarity tend to treat exemplarity as a matter of archival selection that ignores earlier histories of genocide and slavery. A recent example is Alexander Weheliye's critique of Giorgio Agamben (Habeaus Viscus), which seeks to restitute racial slavery as a theoretically significant moment of biological precarity. In a continuation of this logic, this essay introduces the history of Indian Ocean slavery, which precedes transatlantic slavery but is comparatively lesser known. In doing so, I suggest that complaints against archival selection do not go far enough, for they do not address the problem of a kind of event whose very nature is to destroy its own archive. Reading Jean-François Lyotard's differend as a critique of the modern genre-supremacy of historiography, I argue that the very ground of historical examples (namely, the demand that there be proof) demonstrates the regressive nature of exemplarity itself.
Arba’īn names the Shi’a elegiac ritual commemorating the fortieth day of ‘Āshūrā – the 7th centur... more Arba’īn names the Shi’a elegiac ritual commemorating the fortieth day of ‘Āshūrā – the 7th century murder of Husayn at the Battle of Karbala. In South Iranian provinces like Būshihr Arba’īn expresses a distinctly black character marked by animation and drumming virtuosity. Iranian filmmaker Nāsir Taqvāī’s experimental ethnographic documentary Arba’īn (1970) chronicles the regional peculiarities of this ritual, reflecting in both its form and content fragile testament to a haphazardly recorded history of African slavery absorbed into oblivion. Drawing upon historiographical, musicological, ethnographic sources and black studies, this article takes Taqvā’ī’s filmic mediation as an occasion to demonstrate the way so-called syncretized forms reveal historical information about slavery in nontransparent ways.
Persian Literature and Modernity: Production and Reception, 2018
This article explores the vexed relationship between the development of Iranian ethnography, the ... more This article explores the vexed relationship between the development of Iranian ethnography, the Iranian New Wave, and Iranian literary modernity through the trope of the African slave descendent tradition, zar. Naṣir Taqvā’ī and Ghulām-Husayn Sā‘idī, among other Iranian authors and filmmakers, thematize zar in writings and films of the 1960s. Mining Taqvā’ī’s and Sā‘idī’s oeuvres Vaziri argues that the encounter with zar exceeds the order of eventuality; she tracks it throughout these authors’ subsequent work. Retroactively, zar, as a primitive figure for madness, produces coherence for the modernness of Iranian anxiety and alienation in New Wave films and modernist writings. This coherence depends upon the dissolution of zar’s historicity, that is, its relation to the African slave trade. The particularity of this ethnographic encounter thus elicits questions about how to navigate the ethical implications of abstraction in modernist translations of Iranian ethnography.
Taking up the work of Fred Moten, this article explores the power of dissolution when methodologi... more Taking up the work of Fred Moten, this article explores the power of dissolution when methodological forms converge within the context of black studies. It seeks to understand how the methods of poststructuralism can simultaneously elucidate and erode the structural problem of anti-blackness.
"Windridden" explores the qualities of memorialization in Persian Gulf slavery history as express... more "Windridden" explores the qualities of memorialization in Persian Gulf slavery history as expressed through the material and spiritual elements of African healing rituals (zar) in the South of Iran.
Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, 2021
This essay explores how a particular medium—the comic—exposes the limitations of conventional nar... more This essay explores how a particular medium—the comic—exposes the limitations of conventional narratives about sīyāh bāzī (Persian blackface) and hājī fīrūz (a famous blackface figure). Many commentators disavow the racial connotations of sīyāh bāzī and hājī fīrūz, concocting pseudo-historical genealogies that link the improvisatory tradition and figure to pre-Islamic practices; commentators thus repress the tradition’s obvious resonances with the history of African enslavement in Iran. Through a close reading of a comic strip from a 1960s Persian periodical, I argue that historicism is an inadequate framework for adjudicating sīyāh bāzī’s racial or "nonracial" character. Instead, I suggest that cartoon Blackness is always already racial, since the comic form depends upon a process of simplification that is at the heart of racialization.
Maryam Khakipour’s 2004 The Joymakers and its 2008 sequel Shadi form an exemplary site for examin... more Maryam Khakipour’s 2004 The Joymakers and its 2008 sequel Shadi form an exemplary site for examining the dissemination and translation of Persian blackface across time, space, and media. The transmediality of sīyāh bāzī reveals a universal familiarity with the practice of blackface comedy that disrupts commonplace assumptions about its geographical and historical itinerary.
The Holocaust serves as a foundational critical resource in postwar philosophy. Interventions int... more The Holocaust serves as a foundational critical resource in postwar philosophy. Interventions into the logic of its exemplarity tend to treat exemplarity as a matter of archival selection that ignores earlier histories of genocide and slavery. A recent example is Alexander Weheliye's critique of Giorgio Agamben (Habeaus Viscus), which seeks to restitute racial slavery as a theoretically significant moment of biological precarity. In a continuation of this logic, this essay introduces the history of Indian Ocean slavery, which precedes transatlantic slavery but is comparatively lesser known. In doing so, I suggest that complaints against archival selection do not go far enough, for they do not address the problem of a kind of event whose very nature is to destroy its own archive. Reading Jean-François Lyotard's differend as a critique of the modern genre-supremacy of historiography, I argue that the very ground of historical examples (namely, the demand that there be proof) demonstrates the regressive nature of exemplarity itself.
Arba’īn names the Shi’a elegiac ritual commemorating the fortieth day of ‘Āshūrā – the 7th centur... more Arba’īn names the Shi’a elegiac ritual commemorating the fortieth day of ‘Āshūrā – the 7th century murder of Husayn at the Battle of Karbala. In South Iranian provinces like Būshihr Arba’īn expresses a distinctly black character marked by animation and drumming virtuosity. Iranian filmmaker Nāsir Taqvāī’s experimental ethnographic documentary Arba’īn (1970) chronicles the regional peculiarities of this ritual, reflecting in both its form and content fragile testament to a haphazardly recorded history of African slavery absorbed into oblivion. Drawing upon historiographical, musicological, ethnographic sources and black studies, this article takes Taqvā’ī’s filmic mediation as an occasion to demonstrate the way so-called syncretized forms reveal historical information about slavery in nontransparent ways.
Persian Literature and Modernity: Production and Reception, 2018
This article explores the vexed relationship between the development of Iranian ethnography, the ... more This article explores the vexed relationship between the development of Iranian ethnography, the Iranian New Wave, and Iranian literary modernity through the trope of the African slave descendent tradition, zar. Naṣir Taqvā’ī and Ghulām-Husayn Sā‘idī, among other Iranian authors and filmmakers, thematize zar in writings and films of the 1960s. Mining Taqvā’ī’s and Sā‘idī’s oeuvres Vaziri argues that the encounter with zar exceeds the order of eventuality; she tracks it throughout these authors’ subsequent work. Retroactively, zar, as a primitive figure for madness, produces coherence for the modernness of Iranian anxiety and alienation in New Wave films and modernist writings. This coherence depends upon the dissolution of zar’s historicity, that is, its relation to the African slave trade. The particularity of this ethnographic encounter thus elicits questions about how to navigate the ethical implications of abstraction in modernist translations of Iranian ethnography.
Taking up the work of Fred Moten, this article explores the power of dissolution when methodologi... more Taking up the work of Fred Moten, this article explores the power of dissolution when methodological forms converge within the context of black studies. It seeks to understand how the methods of poststructuralism can simultaneously elucidate and erode the structural problem of anti-blackness.
"Windridden" explores the qualities of memorialization in Persian Gulf slavery history as express... more "Windridden" explores the qualities of memorialization in Persian Gulf slavery history as expressed through the material and spiritual elements of African healing rituals (zar) in the South of Iran.
Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, 2021
This essay explores how a particular medium—the comic—exposes the limitations of conventional nar... more This essay explores how a particular medium—the comic—exposes the limitations of conventional narratives about sīyāh bāzī (Persian blackface) and hājī fīrūz (a famous blackface figure). Many commentators disavow the racial connotations of sīyāh bāzī and hājī fīrūz, concocting pseudo-historical genealogies that link the improvisatory tradition and figure to pre-Islamic practices; commentators thus repress the tradition’s obvious resonances with the history of African enslavement in Iran. Through a close reading of a comic strip from a 1960s Persian periodical, I argue that historicism is an inadequate framework for adjudicating sīyāh bāzī’s racial or "nonracial" character. Instead, I suggest that cartoon Blackness is always already racial, since the comic form depends upon a process of simplification that is at the heart of racialization.
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