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In this episode, Belle interviews Dr. Beeta Baghoolizadeh, Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University, about her recent book, The Color Black: Enslavement and Erasure in Iran (Duke University Press, 2024).
In The Color Black: Enslavement and Erasure in Iran (and in our podcast episode), Baghoolizadeh traces histories of enslavement in Iran. In the first part of The Color Black, she focuses on the histories of enslaved Black people in Iran in the nineteenth century, specifically East Africans, analyzing how their presence in the royal court and elite households was subjected to a regime of forced visibility. She then traces the forced invisibility of freed Black people, and the erasure of histories of enslavement following its abolition in Iran in 1929. Baghoolizadeh examines how the histories of enslaved Black people were purposefully removed by authorities, families, and individuals from collective memory and in the subsequent writing of Iranian history.
After outlining what the history of enslavement in Iran looked like, we begin with a discussion of how Baghoolizadeh came to this work. Baghoolizadeh was inspired to begin this research because of comments she heard in Iran and the diaspora that enslavement never existed at all in Iran. Instead, families that had enslaved people in their households claimed they were simply part of the family. She notes how this refrain appeared not only in casual conversations but in archival practices, as well, illustrating the widespread and contradictory forms of denial of this history in contemporary Iran.
Baghoolizadeh uses photographs to illustrate this point, showcasing how in the past, enslaved Black people in particular were included in family photographs as visual props to indicate the family’s prestige. Many contemporary family members and researchers today, however, have described them as having been “part of the family” when looking back upon those records, even though they were included specifically because they were enslaved. There were multiple levels of erasures surrounding the history of enslaved Black people in Iran that are ongoing to this day.
We end with a discussion of blackface practices that still occur in Iranian theatrical spaces, with Baghoolizadeh tracing the history of these practices back to royal court performances that mocked eunuchs during the Qajar era. We discuss the impact of this work, and where she sees future work on enslavement in Iran going.
Guest
Beeta Baghoolizadeh
Beeta Baghoolizadeh is a historian and Associate Research Scholar at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University. Prior to joining Princeton, she was an Assistant Professor of History and Critical Black Studies at Bucknell University. Her first book, The Color Black: Enslavement and Erasure in Iran, was published by Duke University Press in March of 2024, and won the Scholars of Color First Book Award at Duke University Press.
Host
Belle Cheves
Belle Cheves is a senior editor at Ajam Media Collective and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Bard College. Her research focuses on the history of family in Qajar Iran, specifically on how transformations of marital practices and affective perceptions of gender, race, and ethnicity shifted understandings of kinship, enslavement, and domestic service over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Credits
Episode No. 43
Release Date: 9 September 2024
Recording Location: New York, NY
Recording Date: 6 August 2024
Produced by Belle Cheves
Audio Editing: Belle Cheves and Nicholas Gunty
Music: Yavaran (Intro: “404 day in heaven;” Outro: “Har Chi”)
Cover Image: “Not a Marriage Contract,” colors inverted from original. “Sale document of a black slave,” 1891, Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran digital archive, record no. 13122A31, http://www.qajar women.org/en/items/13122A31.html. The original has also been reprinted in The Color Black on page 10.
