Parisa Vaziri, Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery: Iran's Cinematic Archive (University of Minnesota Press, 2023).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Parisa Vaziri (PV): Up until now, the history of slavery and the history of Iranian cinema have been considered distinct and largely unrelated subjects. One of the more idiosyncratic aspects of the book is the way in which it manages to address and reconceptualize these two topics simultaneously. As a graduate student, I was often disappointed by the scholarship available on Indian Ocean slavery. First, because there was relatively little of it, and more seriously, because of this scholarship’s uncritical engagements with race, which I attribute to a kind of dry historical realism. In the book that has ensued in response, part of what I wish to communicate about Indian Ocean slavery is its resistance to becoming-history, its resistance to becoming-fact.
My training is in comparative literature. As a graduate student my focus was on film and media, but I was also reading widely in other subjects: philosophy, anthropology, history, psychoanalysis. Yet, I was the most moved, as a student at UC Irvine, by discourses unfolding concurrently in Black studies. The book is greatly indebted to Black critical thought and its approach to thinking blackness as a question/problem of the human. Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery aspires to conceptualize some of the issues articulated by contemporary Black critical thought on a global scale, reimagining the synergies between transatlantic and Indian Ocean slavery, and the intertwined legacies of slavery and blackness as they pertain beyond the limitations imposed by spatiotemporal determinisms. At the same time, the book wants to grapple explicitly with the difficulties of its own aspirations. I engage with Iranian cinema on a very prosaic level because it reflects some of the legacies I wish to address: for example, rituals passed down by descendants of the enslaved and their communities in the Indian Ocean, the meaning of blackface in the Middle East, entanglements of blackness with various forms of racial nationalism. On a methodological level, I engage cinema because it is an ontologically ambiguous medium that allows me to reflect on some of the problems raised by the desire for pure and simple historical recovery.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
PV: The book addresses a range of different film genres and periods, from Iranian commercial filmmaking in the 1950s to the development of avant-garde image-making in the 1960s and ‘70s, to wartime cinema in the ‘80s. I discuss both very well-known films and rather obscure ones. But it is at least equally important to mention that my approach to cinema is inspired by film philosophy. This is why the cinematic archive is most appropriate to the argument I make about Indian Ocean slavery. Fundamentally, the book wants to challenge our naturalized demand for slavery’s “facticity.” It is not that historians cannot or are not continuing to write histories of Indian Ocean slavery. Rather, what I try to problematize or question is historiography’s dependence upon and simultaneous disavowal of its own processes of fact-construction. What is perhaps unique about the book is that this is a line of thought I carry forward primarily by way of an engagement with the evolution of cinematic form, in particular, the relationship between continuity and discontinuity and the various stylistic techniques that divided commercial from experimental filmmaking in the history of cinema.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
PV: The book evolved out of my PhD dissertation, but, at least from my own perspective, it is a totally transformed object. Even the two book chapters that have been previously published in different form are quite distinct from their eventual monograph versions. For example, chapter two, “Zār and the Anxieties of the Iranian New Wave” (previously published under a different name in an anthology on Persian literary modernity) weaves together a new history of the Iranian New Wave, taking two midcentury experimental films about zar (healing ritual) as a starting point for articulating the convoluted relation between racial blackness, transatlantic slavery, and Indian Ocean slavery. The chapter in some sense exemplifies one of the book’s underlying intentions: it places transatlantic slavery on a global scale while conceiving theoretical resources out of the challenges in doing so. Details from ethnographic studies of zar (in Iran, Egypt, Oman, Turkey, Ethiopia, Somalia) inform a close reading of film that is inspired by zar’s central component—a therapeutic lapse of consciousness. (I expand upon the implications of this central non-consciousness for a model of the historical trace in various publications, most explicitly in a short essay I was invited to contribute to Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences in 2023.) The rhythms that lead to non-consciousness, the cinematic blank that both intercedes and enables perceptual cohesion, and finally, the capacity for repetition—and thus, falsity and error— required by facticity: a more adventurous engagement with the complicity of these realms has greatly evolved this text over time. I started out with questions about the abstraction of history in aesthetic objects. In the course of revising the book, I learned how to tolerate, and then more fully appreciate, the abstraction that is structurally intrinsic to facts. In my writings thus far, I am less interested in offering or rehearsing a history of Indian Ocean slavery than in imagining at the ends of its structural impossibility.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
PV: My hope for the book is that it will be read by scholars and students with an interest in theory writ large, Black studies, race and ethnic studies, film and media studies, postcolonial thought, comparative histories of slavery, and Iranian and Middle Eastern studies. Though, with regard to the latter, it is important to state that the book explicitly moves against some of the dominant rubrics of area studies that rely upon various models of information-extraction. Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery is intended primarily to generate thinking about the construction of facts rather than to simply yield or transmit facts that can or should be taken at face value. More broadly then, I hope the book will attract anyone interested in theories of fact, questions of the archive, historical context. Even beyond the scope of “content,” I could imagine the book intriguing people generally interested in lyrical academic writing, or scholarship that experiments with the formal requirements of academic work. In turns of impact, I hope the book inspires more invention, more freedom, especially for those students whose geographical orientation automatically shuttles them into the too-constraining frameworks of area studies.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
PV: I am currently engaged in a very different kind of project that explores the relationship between midcentury cybernetics, the history of ethnographic film, and Black critical thought. This project takes as its central theme the concept of “autopoiesis” in the work of Sylvia Wynter, tracing its relationship to popular quasi-synonymous terms like recursion, recursivity, and plasticity. I explore Wynter’s autopoiesis in relation to various twentieth-century modes of anti-representationalist and self-referential thought, including its manifestations in film theory and philosophy. At the same time, I root the genealogy of autopoiesis in a series of racialized distinctions that characterize the historical evolution from first to second-order cybernetics.
J: Can you tell us a little about the book’s cover?
PV: It is enough to glance at the three terms in the title to intuit there might be something peculiar about the book’s disciplinary orientation. In Black studies, the history of slavery achieves its most theoretical direction; slavery and its racial legacies are no longer simply historical phenomena, but must be thought upon multiple registers—philosophical, metaphysical. The book participates in this reconceptualization of slavery in its own way: on the one hand, by being unapologetically speculative and, on the other, by refusing to subordinate the enigma of transmission to what we too easily want to grasp as content. The cover features abstract, billowing ceremonial smoke associated with zar, a communal ritual associated with the enslaved and their descendants in the Indian Ocean. Zar’s phenomenology allows me to show what is exemplary about Indian Ocean slavery: its refusal to adhere to the norms of fact and memory as they have been shaped by academic discourse and expectation. The softness of the title’s characters, which almost fade into the black backdrop of the cover, reflect the book’s central concern with the precarity of facticity.
Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction: Indian Ocean Slavery, Cinema, and the Perversion of Context, pages 6 to 9)
There is no secure, conquerable fund of information to plunder. Instead, blackness in Iranian cinema urges us to question the very process by which historical facts are constructed in the first place. Transmission, a condition of possibility for the very facticity or factuality of fact, opens fact to its own erosion, perversion, and displacement—to falsity, forgetting, and decontextualization. An inevitable, ineradicable falsity inheres at the heart of (historical) truth. On the one hand, fact’s self-erosion is constitutive, rather than accidental; fact affects itself from within. And thus, cinema helps us to recognize something immemorial, and immemorially disavowed, about facticity. On the other hand, as a modern technological medium, cinema also demands a certain reckoning with the complex specificity of its own historical inception: a modernity whose defining feature is displacement, decontextualization, and conjunction. If, as I will argue, slavery allows for a certain thematization of violence and displacement in modernist Iranian cinema, this is because slavery is itself context perversion of the most radical kind. Abstractions condemn “the enslaved to the living historical hell of decontextualization,” protest historians of slavery. But isn’t the historian’s anxiety about stabilizing and policing slavery’s contexts merely a pale reflection of the vertiginous loss of context that slavery originarily is? The cinematic orphaning of the image bodes a soft natal alienation for which the violence proper to enslavement is the unthinkable limit. It is no coincidence that slavery’s historical truth is imperiled by the very distortion of experience that slavery fundamentally is, prior to its emergence as a desirable object of knowledge. And if the nature of historical fact is to conceal, by presuming, the conditions of possibility for consensus about its existence, slavery destroys every pretension to consensus, every assumption of self-evidence, every claim to fact. In a sense, slavery cannot be a fact. For slavery is the very destruction of facts.
Cinematic Form and Conjunction
Although internationally recognized, Iranian cinema is primarily known for its arthouse repertoire, and thus, generally confined to circuits of elite exchange. Both prerevolutionary New Wave and postrevolutionary arthouse films were, and continue to be, regular contenders at international film festivals. By contrast, fīlmfārsī, a mode of commercial filmmaking that describes popular prerevolutionary films of the 1950s to 1970s is largely unfamiliar to most audiences and film scholars outside of Iran. In scholarship and critical opinion, fīlmfārsī is the detritus of Iranian cinema, abased and embarrassed by the prestigious, globally acclaimed, but statistically marginal Iranian New Wave and postrevolutionary art cinema. Fīlmfārsī absorbs modernity’s violent diremptions and reflects them thematically. Characterized by core plot themes that often revolve around familiar conflicts enmeshed within the opposition between tradition and modernity, fīlmfārsī is replete with escapist melodrama, clichés, hyperemotional romance, and gendered violence. Fīlmfārsī offers ambivalent responses toward accelerated modernization by internalizing acceleration at the level of its form. Frequent, usually erratically placed scenes, digressions into musical interlude, and inexplicable ellipses are just some of the critically maligned, discordant, and sensationalized stylistic means by which this absorption plays out. Domestic popular film tunnels through to collective desire and fantasy, an estranged zone that gives us “those darker images—crushed, trampled, slackened, or dense—of all that swarms in the lower depths of the mind.” Despite its unfamiliarity to most film scholars, fīlmfārsī was far more popular than Iranian arthouse films have ever been domestically, undermining the confident distinction between high and low, value and nullity. Fīlmfārsī fabulizes, seduces, distracts, fictionalizes life, reveals life as fiction, and is the ground against which alternative, modernist, or New Wave cinema arises to demand mature, politicized engagements with reality. And yet, thwarted by a blackness that destabilizes confidence in perception, such dignified political prescriptions are set adrift, devolving into anxiety about the very possibility of a univocal reality to be grasped.
The films discussed in this book include both art cinema (New Wave, alternative, or modernist cinema—terms I invoke interchangeably), as well as experimental documentary and commercial films (fīlmfārsī, under which I sometimes indiscriminately subsume difficult-to-categorize prerevolutionary titles). Particularly because they are lesser known, in certain cases frankly obscure, my readings of Iranian films demand some engagement with specific sociohistorical contexts and genre distinctions. Nevertheless, my approach to Iranian cinema is primarily motivated by cinematic form as a mode of thinking. This is in line with contemporary film and media theory that treats cinema as a philosophical reflection upon experience and consciousness, rather than, or in addition to, being a ready-made aesthetic form in history available to endlessly debatable taxonomy. In other words, while I recognize that, like other national cinemas, Iranian cinema is traditionally approached as a geographically and culturally bound instantiation of a historical medium, my readings of specific films are foremost preoccupied by the ways in which cinematic form demasks the self-assurance of context specificity. Decontextualization and conjunction are the very basis of the cinematographic image, its “tragic phenomenology.”
Because they are complex, world-making objects that expose the fragility of distinction between the real and imaginal, engagement with cinematic works demands methodological innovation, flexibility, and anarchical modes of address. I therefore move fluidly between meditations on context and form, allowing the formal capacities of the object of analysis to work retroactively on the imposition and overdetermination of meaning characteristic of context. Indeed, I argue that cinema is constitutively oriented toward a certain extenuation of context, or rather, toward a certain infinitization of contexts. This includes contexts and ways of seeing that would cast doubt upon the humanist valorization, and projection of autonomy, of aesthetic form itself. In turn, I take the inevitable proliferation of context that cinema generates as a model for inquiry into the inherent destitution of autonomous, context-bound historical fact.
Cinema does not communicate fact. And nor does it posit equivalences. Cinema produces conjunctions: “Racial blackness” and. The paratactic operator aggregates. And “doesn’t just upset all relations, it upsets being.” Against proclamation: provocation, conjunction. The term racial blackness in the title of this book may appear as a surprise and anomaly, even an anachronistic affront to scholars and historians who are familiar with Indian Ocean historiography. I ask the alarmed to pause and patient the and. The weightlessness of this small, here italicized word, the third word of this book’s title, only appears to bear a comfortable self-evidence. For both the copula and its negation are impossible absolutes. And is spacing itself. Space is a kind of and.
Whether one considers mise-en-scène as its quintessence, découpage (cutting, editing, montage), or its particular intimacy with the economic processes underlying globalization, cinematic functions are propositional, cultivating proximities through disjunction, violating contexts. Cinema’s formal potentialities are modes of punctuation. Among its best elaborated theorizations in the twentieth century, both mise-en-scène and montage have come to stand, alternately, for the essence of cinema as a form of intelligence. It is well known that for the most radical filmmakers of the early twentieth century, montage was considered a revolutionary discovery, a process whose theorization carried out into the 1950s and 1960s during the various global waves of new cinema. By contrast, in published periodicals and interviews, Iranian New Wave filmmakers derogated prerevolutionary commercial cinema precisely for the ubiquity of its promiscuous sampling of montage; the haphazard, confusing, unfinished feel of its editing; its seemingly chaotic discontinuities and conjunctions; its sense of authorlessness (fāqid-i kārgardān, as the famous critic Amīr HūshangKāvūsī characterized them), its context nihilism. In response, alternative Iranian cinema reveals a proclivity for the long take evocative of neorealism, and is why the New Wave’s stylistic inheritances have been described as amphibolic. The slowness of the long take rebels against fīlmfārsī aimlessness, against the blustering cuts of puerile montage—as if political dissatisfaction might be modulated through cinematic techniques that stabilize perception and sharpen attention, orienting the viewer properly toward what is real.
Excerpted from the Introduction to Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery: Iran’s Cinematic Archive by Parisa Vaziri. Published by the University of Minnesota Press. Copyright 2023 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved. Used by permission.