Parisa Vaziri

Parisa Vaziri is an associate professor of Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University Her research and teaching interests explore critiques of history, the subject, and the concept of the human as articulated primarily by Black critical thought, poststructuralist theory, and film and media studies. Her book-in-progress, Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery: Iran’s Cinematic Archive, theorizes the cinematically mediated legacies of African enslavement in the Indian Ocean and their implications for notions of context, cultural specificity, and historicity as self-evident, impermeable modes of appeal. Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery places the understudied history of African enslavement in the Indian Ocean in mutual relation with the more theoretically robust history of transatlantic slavery, arguing for blackness as a (historically enigmatic) form of global relationality. Simultaneously, the book offers a new history of Iranian cinema that foregrounds the tensions between experimental aesthetics and prerevolutionary commercial cinema, positing cinema as an exemplary repository for the technological and cultural anxieties that modernity proffers as ontological. Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slaveryis forthcoming in December 20213 from UMN Press. At Cornell, Vaziri holds a joint appointment with Near Eastern Studies and teaches courses on race, critical theory, slavery, and film and media. She has published articles in Philosophy Today, Qui Parle, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, and TDR: The Drama Review, among other journals.