"Parisa Vaziri's care for Iranian cinema reveals a complex archive--a curriculum, a vigor--that exceeds local abstraction. Its new waves and new particularities are 'symptoms of the global.' Her deep analytic concern with racial blackness shows that the absence that makes possible the local and the global is also the presence that disrupts the givenness of self and world. Rigorously, beautifully, Vaziri transforms the history of the Indian Ocean and the history of cinema."--Fred Moten, New York University "Parisa Vaziri's Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery is a truly groundbreaking work that asks us to seriously take up the question: What is blackness in Iranian culture? She critically interrogates the claim that Indian Ocean slavery has largely been forgotten in popular Iranian memory with her illuminating exposition and insightful analysis. Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery prompts us to do a far better job of exploring the lived experience of blackness in modernity beyond the structures of the Atlantic sphere and to reconsider our thinking about the relationship between slavery, Africa, blackness, and the globalization of the nation state."--R. A.

Judy, author of Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiesis in Black "Incisive, theoretically rich, and deeply researched, Parisa Vaziri's Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery challenges us to see the cinematic material she analyzes in new and striking ways. Crossing conventional disciplinary and area-studies boundaries, Vaziri's book demands that we rethink the premises of our assumptions about blackness and histories of enslavement in West Asia, especially in Iran."--Amy Motlagh, author of Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran "Vaziri's book goes beyond observing the erasure of black narratives in the Iranian cinematic archive, it exposes the Iranian pre-revolutionary cinematic archive for its profound antiblackness."-- Africa is a Country "As preservation, translation, and curation efforts of these and related films expand, we will return to Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery 's elegant readings of non-exemplary elements that tend to activate audiences' curiosity, to its theorization of the politics of nonfiction modernist film, and to its comparativist knack for unsettling configurations of academic turf and linking these films to driving questions in the humanities."-- Critical Inquiry "Vaziri's work is a crucial contribution to media studies, offering insightful critiques and celebrating cinema's potential as an intellectual stimulant." -- Digital Humanities Quarterly.