Through close readings of photography, architecture, family records, and contemporary ethnographic observations, Beeta Baghoolizadeh’s The Color Black: Enslavement and Erasure in Iran offers a polemical intervention into the study of Blackness as racial ontology in contemporary Iran. Baghoolizadeh begins her study in the Qajar period by considering the forced visibility of enslaved Black Abyssinians within elite domestic environs. Previous scholarship on the history of slavery in Iran, notably Behnaz A. Mirzai’s A History of Slavery and Emancipation in Iran, 1800-1929 (2017), has focused on the preponderance of enslaved Afro-Iranians in the port cities of the Persian Gulf and the continued exploitation of their descendants’ labor within these regions.

Yet many living persons of Iran’s racial majority, constructed as white in self-perception, deny the existence of afro-descendency in the polity entirely, suggesting, among other poppycock theories, that Black Iranian phenotypic expressions are due solely to the sunny Southern coastal clime. Baghoolizadeh’s work excoriates that scholarship which only tepidly appreciates the centrality of Blackness to the regime of enslavement. To take but one example: Mirzai’s monograph goes into extensive detail on the methods by which enslaved Abyssinian children were kidnapped, castrated, and sold to well-to-do Iranian families, while claiming that racial slurs and epithets marking their Blackness were, in fact, terms of endearment. 

With the advent of the family portrait photographic industry in the nineteenth century came an aesthetic genre wherein enslaved Black persons were forcefully visibilized, posed as props to accentuate the power and prestige of the enslaving. Baghoolizadeh provides close readings of these visual materials drawn from online archives and family collections, and is particularly keen on provoking empathic readings of the Black subjects that do not gloss over the ugliness of their subjugation. This aesthetic genre of photography was made for the consumption of bourgeois enslaving families to pass down to their descendants, propagating a self-narrative of benevolent largesse: “sometimes these photos were framed so that the family could put their ideal household on display. Those who inherited these photographs from their enslaving ancestors often have little to add, only insisting that their families were very kind to the enslaved children.” Much of Baghoolizadeh’s job in proving the ridiculousness of such assertions force the reader to attend to the visuals:

[In] these portraits, [the enslaved] were always distinguished from the children of the enslaving family  [ . . . ] as in figure 2.6, where the children of the enslaving family are all seated, either on chairs or on the floor, while the young enslaved boy was the only one forced to stand. His expression—he was clearly angry—makes us wonder what else he was forced to do. His expression was part of the photograph, a contrast to the sons of the enslaving family, who merely looked blank or even a little smug.

Portrait photography of enslaved eunuchs merits an entire chapter. The mere presence of eunuchs, Baghoolizadeh explains, is symbolic of the royal crown—valued for their palace employ, able to cross the boundary between the harem and male-dominated spheres without, in her words, “raising suspicions of sexual intrigue.” Baghoolizadeh argues that while the non-consensual mutilation of another’s body is forbidden within Islam, the importance of the eunuch within Islamicate societies acknowledged a prima facie understanding of gender as a spectrum instead of a binary. Due to the later restrictions on the slave trade towards the end of the nineteenth century and before complete manumission in 1929, “the extinction of eunuchs as a common category of gender within Iran also contributed to the normative idea of a gender binary where male and female genders were viewed as distinctly oppositional to each other during the early twentieth century.” 

While this “extinction” undoubtedly had cultural repercussions, the attempt to demarcate a moment where Iranian culture uniformly embraced the gender binary poses its own problems. Such an instinct could lead to the preclusion of gender expression outside the binary from social history between manumission in 1929 and Ayatollah Khomeini’s writings on the permissibility of gender affirming care four decades later—when said persons always have lived in Iranian society and always shall. While this is Baghoolizadeh’s least developed argument, it is a far from fatal flaw, and detailed deliberation lies outside the scope of this review. 

Rather, it is Baghoolizadeh’s reading of the connection between the institution of enslaving eunuchs to comedic genres of Blackface that packs most of The Color Black’s punch. The most ignominious Blackface character, Haji Firuz, is himself named after an Abyssinian eunuch who was enslaved by the Qajar regime. Baghoolizadeh demonstrates how Iranian minstrelsy culture, referred to by the shorthand of siyah bazi (literally “playing black”), developed as a genre through the use of an archive of humor magazines, photos, and interviews with performers themselves. The second half of The Color Black sets out to document how the institution of slavery and anti-Blackness is subject to cultural erasure through what Baghoolizadeh dubs as “genres of distortion.” Using Michel Trouillot’s 1995 work Silencing the Past as her theoretical foundation, Baghoolizadeh identifies in plain-faced and sarcastic prose how non-Black Iranians, both residing in Iran and in the diaspora, seek to sanitize Blackface minstrelsy and its connection to domestic slavery. 

When the white Iranian aristocracy, and thus the hegemonic institutions of Iranian history-making, do acknowledge the place of Black life, it is through flippant language that would be comical were it not for the brutality of what it elides. Baghoolizadeh narrates:

Once in a while, this past and its memories come to the fore. At the 2016 Association for Iranian Studies conference in Vienna, a descendant of the Qajar royal family responded to a panel on Iran’s history of race and enslavement with this comment: ‘I grew up with slaves. And let me tell you, the Black ones were the fun ones. And they weren’t slaves—they took care of the babies and shopping. Sometimes we even left them alone with kids.’ She added that they also let them go to the movie theaters.

As Baghoolizadeh’s argument goes, the purpose of the genre of distortion for the descendents of slaveholders is to maintain a self-narrative of prophetic infallibility—while making a rather sly allusion to the Shi’i doctrine of ‘isma, ascribed only to prophets, imams, and angels through this word choice. Baghoolizadeh thus astutely asserts how merely suggesting that there could be something morally suspect in Iran’s history of enslavement and Blackface is sufficient rope for the racially privileged. While the presence of Haji Firuz appears clearly as a racist caricature to those not primed by in-group biases, the instinct to justify it proves too strong to resist. The Blackface makeup is chocked-up to the character jumping over the fire on Chaharshanbe Suri; diasporic Iranian afterschool programs explain him as an autochthonous Santa Claus, or perhaps as a Zoroastrian fire-tender. To these same defenders, many of whom are secular, the suggestion to ban the practice rhymes with what they deem a program of “anti-happiness” implemented by the post-1979 revolutionary regime.

The cutting edge of Baghoolizadeh’s intervention, then, lies as much within the critical assessment of contemporary white Iranian (dis)imaginations of the nation’s slave-holding past and racial construction of Blackness as it is an assessment of her historical archive of period photographs, drawings, paintings, legal records and travelogues. Too often the word ‘erasure’ is thrown around in contemporary critical history circles without a concrete methodology to elicit, map, and demarcate that process. Baghoolizadeh doesn’t just gently offer a suggestion to listen to the silences of the archive. Her work is a command to snap out of it.