Race against Time

Abstract This article attempts to think race, sexuality, and temporality together in modern Iran. By analyzing modern Iranian literature, cinema, and media, it argues that the figure of the Indian evokes difference embodied in physiognomy, language, and sexuality in the Iranian imagination. Moreover, the Indian is temporally out of place and appears as a specter of the premodern Persianate past shared by Iran and India, haunting the modern, nationalist present. After examining racialized depictions of Indians in premodern Persianate texts, the article considers the raced, sexualized, heterotemporal figure of the Indian in popular novels like Dear Uncle Napoleon (1973), Savushun (1969), and The Patient Stone (1966); films like Qarun’s Treasure (1965); and various musical performances from the 1970s to the 2010s. The article contends that for Iranians, the Indian’s uncanny combination of similarity and alterity provokes anxieties about sexuality and racial modernity by seemingly disrupting the temporality of the present.