Overview
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.
At Cornell, Vaziri holds a joint appointment with Near Eastern Studies, is a field member of Performing and Media 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.
Research Focus
Parisa’s forthcoming work engages the concept of recursion in contemporary media theory, tracing its development in cybernetics, links to early twentieth century anthropology and ethnographic film, and racialized descriptions of the human. Recursion, as a model of how both brains and machines learn, reflects modern discourses on plasticity and human capacity for change, while repressing the histories of colonialism, slavery, and race that render capacity both differentiated and ontologically vulnerable.
Publications
New Books Network: Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery
"False Differends: Racial Slavery and the Genocidal Example." Philosophy Today, Feb. 2022
“Arb’ain and Bakhshu’s Lament: African Slavery in the Persian Gulf and the Violence of Cultural Form.” Antropologia: Racial Questions: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Dynamics in Africa and the Middle East, vol. 7, no. 1, April 2020
“Pneumatics of Blackness: Nasir Taqvai’s Bad-i Jin and Modernism’s Anthropological Drive.” Persian Literature and Modernity: Production and Reception. Edited by Hamid Rezaei Yazdi and Arshavez Mozafari. Routledge, 2018
“Windridden: On the Nonvalue of Nonidentification.” Liquid Blackness, vol. 3, no. 6, 2017, pp. 66-79.
