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 first book, Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery: Iran's Cinematic Archive (University of Minnesota Press), 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. For more, see Critical Inquiry, New Books Network, and Jadaliyya.