Parisa Vaziri's Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery is not merely a study of Iranian cinema; it is an act of epistemological reorientation. The book compels us to rethink the coordinates of both film theory and Indian Ocean studies by revealing how the racial and historical residues of slavery structure the very grammar of modern Iranian visual culture. For Vaziri, the absence of slavery in Iran's official historiography does not indicate historical insignificance but rather the violence of epistemic erasure—an erasure that cinema, through its aesthetic ruptures and material fragility, paradoxically discloses.Vaziri's starting point is the “destitution of facts” (3) that defines Indian Ocean slavery. The historical record, she writes, “betrays an injustice that historiography neutralizes” (2). Against this archival void, she turns to the cinematic image as an alternative historical sensorium and as a space where traces of bondage return as texture, rhythm, and interruption. Unlike the Atlantic paradigm of slavery, which has yielded an extensive theoretical corpus on race and representation, the Indian Ocean's diffuse and assimilative system leaves behind spectral rather than documentary remains. The enslaved are not visible as subjects but as formal disturbances within the field of representation. Vaziri's methodology does not aim to recover lost archives but to cultivate a new mode of reading, of what one might term a poetics of ruination. This stance unsettles both positivist historiography and nationalist film history. In the absence of factual recovery, cinema becomes the medium through which erasure itself gains visibility. Dust, flicker, and distortion—cinema's inherent vulnerabilities—become indices of what she calls the ephemeral ontology of racial memory.At the heart of Vaziri's argument lies a radical redefinition of Blackness. “Figures of Blackness” include not only depictions of Black subjects but also practices such as siyāh bāzī and the zār ritual, which, though detached from Africa in the Iranian imaginary, carry its sonic and corporeal resonances. These figures exceed context; they circulate, mutate, and haunt Iranian modernity, constantly undoing the illusion of a racially homogenous national identity. In this formulation, Blackness becomes what Fred Moten calls a break in representation, a site where the visual field falters under the weight of what it cannot fully contain.1 Iranian cinema's blackface comedies, its ethnographic encounters, and its littoral landscapes all participate in this dynamic. They do not depict slavery but perform its afterlife through aesthetic contradictions—through laughter that conceals mourning, or spectacle that collapses into opacity.One of Vaziri's most profound theoretical interventions is her articulation of the cinematic unconscious in regard to the histories of Indian Ocean slavery in Iran. Iranian cinema, she argues, internalized the racial hierarchies of modernity not as content but as form. The camera's drive toward fixity, precision, and calculation—the very technological essence of modern film—mirrors “the concept of race, to which blackness is tethered as if immemorially, a drive for fixity and organization exemplary of modernity more generally” (21–22). The Iranian New Wave's celebrated realism, with its long takes and measured pacing, sought to escape the artifice of fīlmfārsī melodrama and approach “truth.” Yet, Vaziri contends, this truth was haunted by the racialized gaze embedded in cinematic realism itself—a gaze that sought to stabilize what history had rendered unstable. In films such as Bād-i Jin and The House Is Black, she locates a cinematic language of trembling and possession, in which the camera's steadiness is constantly undermined by its own vibrations. Iranian modernism, in this light, appears less as the awakening of vision than as the revelation of its racial unconscious.Another striking achievement of the book is its linkage of slavery to oil as twin regimes of extraction. The Persian Gulf's “cinematic South,” Vaziri argues, is haunted by both the memory of enslaved African labor and the spectacle of petro-modernity. Oil inherits the geography of bondage, turning enslaved ports into industrial frontiers. The camera's slow pans over pipelines and machinery aestheticize submission and discipline, echoing the control once exerted over enslaved bodies. This parallel between slavery and oil posits that extraction—whether of bodies, resources, or images—is the structural logic of modernity itself. The continuity between the dhow and the oil rig, the slave port and the refinery, defines a racial economy of visibility that Iranian cinema both reproduces and exposes.The book's treatment of the littoral as a cinematic unstable space between land and sea also marks a significant contribution to Indian Ocean studies. Just as the coast is shaped by ceaseless motion, so too is Iran's cinematic archive a site of erosion, sedimentation, and recurrence. For Vaziri, the Iranian archive's incompleteness—its missing reels, censored footage, and decaying prints—is not a deficiency but a historical truth. The archive, figured as a haunted site, unsettles the critic's desire for completion. Its ghosts resist assimilation, demanding an ethics of haunting in which absence becomes legible as structure, and decay as the very form of historical meaning.Refusing to treat Iran as exceptional, Vaziri situates Iranian modernity within a transoceanic history of race and capital. The Indian Ocean is not an “elsewhere” but a constitutive dimension of global modernity. By tracing how slavery's unrecorded legacies surface in Iran's cinematic unconscious, she extends the scope of Black studies beyond the Atlantic without collapsing its theoretical precision. In doing so, Vaziri also transforms the methodological horizons of Indian Ocean studies. Her approach—intensely theoretical and attuned to form—invites the field to move beyond empirical recovery toward aesthetic and epistemological critique. She shows that the oceanic past survives not in archives or oral traditions but in gestures, grain, rhythm, and decay.Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery is a book of rare conceptual audacity. It demands that we reconsider what counts as evidence, what counts as race, and what counts as the archive. Through a reading practice attuned to flicker, vibration, and disappearance, Vaziri opens Indian Ocean studies to the question of form as history. Her intervention lies in making this instability not a limitation but a method of thinking with the sea, with cinema, and with the spectral lives that modernity tried to forget.
Firat Oruc (Fri,) studied this question.