{"podcast":{"title":"New Books in Iranian Studies","slug":"new-books-in-iranian-studies-6707694","podcast_index_feed_id":6707694,"rss_url":"https://feeds.megaphone.fm/NBNK4310987155","website_url":"https://newbooksnetwork.com","image_url":"https://megaphone.imgix.net/podcasts/009720be-8e2e-11ee-8bc9-6bbc6420e78e/image/32ca5502b9ad911a9e8d05d229de3bef.png?ixlib=rails-4.3.1&max-w=3000&max-h=3000&fit=crop&auto=format,compress","author":"New Books Network","episode_count":120,"summary":"This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork","last_synced_at":"2026-06-04T18:17:45.742387+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-iranian-studies-6707694"},"episode":{"title":"Parisa Vaziri, \"Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery: Iran's Cinematic Archive\" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)","slug":"parisa-vaziri-racial-blackness-and-indian-ocean-slavery-iran-s-cinematic-archive-u-minnesota-press-2023","published_at":"2025-02-09T09:00:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-iranian-studies-6707694/parisa-vaziri-racial-blackness-and-indian-ocean-slavery-iran-s-cinematic-archive-u-minnesota-press-2023","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-iranian-studies-6707694","url":"https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK6109661774.mp3?updated=1738942412","audio_url":"https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK6109661774.mp3?updated=1738942412","summary":"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 (fīlmfārsii) and alternative filmmaking (the Iranian New Wave), she pays particular attention to the healing ritual zar 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: Iran's Cinematic Archive (U Minnesota Press, 2023) 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 overpower…","meta_description":"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 surrou…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":5040,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/new-books-in-iranian-studies-6707694/episodes/parisa-vaziri-racial-blackness-and-indian-ocean-slavery-iran-s-cinematic-archive-u-minnesota-press-2023/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-iranian-studies-6707694/parisa-vaziri-racial-blackness-and-indian-ocean-slavery-iran-s-cinematic-archive-u-minnesota-press-2023.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}