The first history of slavery in this key Middle Eastern country and how it shaped the nation’s unique character. Slavery in the Middle East is a growing field of study, but the history of slavery in a key country, Iran, has never before been written. This history extends to Africa in the west and India in the east, to Russia and Turkmenistan in the north, and to the Arab states in the south. As the slave trade between Iran and these regions shifted over time, it transformed the nation and helped forge its unique culture and identity. Thus, a history of Iranian slavery is crucial to understanding the character of the modern nation. Drawing on extensive archival research in Iran, Tanzania, England, and France, as well as fieldwork and interviews in Iran, Behnaz A. Mirzai offers the first history of slavery in modern Iran from the early nineteenth century to emancipation in the mid-twentieth century. She investigates how foreign military incursion, frontier insecurity, political instability, and economic crisis altered the patterns of enslavement, as well as the ethnicity of the slaves themselves. Mirzai’s interdisciplinary analysis illuminates the complex issues surrounding the history of the slave trade and the process of emancipation in Iran, while also giving voice to social groups that have never been studied: enslaved Africans and Iranians. Her research builds a clear case that the trade in slaves was inexorably linked to the authority of the state. During periods of greater decentralization, slave trading increased, while periods of greater governmental autonomy saw more freedom and peace. “This is a major contribution to the study of enslavement in Iran, which will doubtlessly become a must-read for any future studies of Middle Eastern and Islamic enslavement and abolition, as well as for any work on Iranian history in general.” —Ehud R. Toledano, Tel Aviv University, author of As If Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East “While this book will be revelatory to scholars of Iran, it also promises to engage with theoretical trends in the study of slavery elsewhere. It frames many research questions broadly to engage with scholars of slavery in other Muslim lands, as well as slavery elsewhere.” —Kamran Scot Aghaie, University of Texas at Austin, coeditor of Rethinking Iranian Nationalism and Modernity

Outlines the evolving U.S.-Iran relationship from 1800 until 1988, highlighting the intersection of diplomatic, social, and cultural changes.

What is the nature of slavery as practiced and at times reintroduced over the past two centuries in the Middle East and North Africa? In spite of the rich regional diversity of the areas studied – from Morocco to the Indian Ocean to Iran – this anthology demonstrates clear commonalities across the super-region. These include the regulation of slavery by Islam and local traditions, the absence of a rigid racial hierarchy as in North American slavery, the management of the sexuality and reproductive capacity of female slaves, and views on identity and heritage among descendants of slaves. Authors also examine the economic and theological underpinnings of contemporary slavery and human trafficking. The book is among the first to focus on slavery across the Islamic world from the 19th century to the present – a period constituting the endgame of institutionalized slavery in the region but also the persistence of forms of de facto enslavement. Each chapter scrutinizes from a different vantage point – institutions, economics, the abolitionist movement, literature, folklore, and the moving image – creating a multi-dimensional picture of the phenomenon. The authors have mined government archives and statistics, memoirs, interviews, photographs, drawings, songs, cinema and television. Not only are Arabic, Persian and Turkish sources leveraged, but a variety of materials in minor and endangered languages, such as Soqotri, Balochi and Sorani Kurdish, in addition to European languages.

Fire Under My Feet seeks to expose the diverse, significant, and often under-researched historical and developmental phenomena revealed by studies in the dance systems of the African Diaspora. In the book, written documentation and diverse methodologies are buttressed by the experiences of those whose lives are built around the practice of African diaspora dance. Replete with original perspectives, this book makes a significant contribution to dance and African diaspora scholarship simultaneously. Most important, it highlights the work of researchers from Ecuador, India, Puerto Rico, the United States, and the United Kingdom, and it exposes under-researched and omitted voices of the African diaspora dance world of the aforesaid locations and Puerto Rico, Columbia, and Trinidad as well. This study showcases a blend of scholars, dance practitioners, and interdisciplinarity, and engages the relationship between African diaspora dance and the fields of history, performance studies, critical race theory, religion, identity, and black agency.

In Possessed by the Right Hand, the first comprehensive legal history of slavery in Islam ever offered to readers, Bernard K. Freamon, an African-American Muslim law professor, provides a penetrating analysis of the problems of slavery and slave-trading in Islamic history. After examining the issues from pre-Islamic times through to the nineteenth century, Professor Freamon considers the impact of Western abolitionism, arguing that such efforts have been a failure, with the notion of abolition becoming nothing more than a cruel illusion. He closes this ground-breaking account with an examination of the slaving ideologies and actions of ISIS and Boko Haram, asserting that Muslims now have an important and urgent responsibility to achieve true abolition under the aegis of Islamic law. See Bernard Freamon live at Rutgers Law School (October 8, 2019). Listen to Possessed by the Right Hand: An Interview with Prof. Bernard Freamon from Network ReOrient on Anchor

The first comprehensive study of Iran's political and cultural interactions with Africa during the Cold War and decolonisation.

Rethinking the history of African enslavement in the western Indian Ocean through the lens of Iranian cinema From the East African and Red Sea coasts to the Persian Gulf ports of Bushihr, Kish, and Hurmuz, sailing and caravan networks supplied Iran and the surrounding regions with African slave labor from antiquity to the nineteenth century. This book reveals how Iranian cinema preserves the legacy of this vast and yet long-overlooked history that has come to be known as Indian Ocean slavery. How does a focus on blackness complicate traditional understandings of history and culture? Parisa Vaziri addresses this question by looking at residues of the Indian Ocean slave trade in Iranian films from the second half of the twentieth century. Revealing the politicized clash between commercial cinema (fīlmfārsī) and alternative filmmaking (the Iranian New Wave), she pays particular attention to the healing ritual zār, which is both an African slave descendent practice and a constitutive element of Iranian culture, as well as to cinematic sīyāh bāzī (Persian black play). Moving beyond other studies on Indian Ocean and trans-Saharan slavery, Vaziri highlights the crystallization of a singular mode of historicity within these cinematic examples—one of “absence” that reflects the relative dearth of archival information on the facts surrounding Indian Ocean slavery. Bringing together cinema studies, Middle East studies, Black studies, and postcolonial theory, Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery explores African enslavement in the Indian Ocean through the revelatory and little-known history of Iranian cinema. It shows that Iranian film reveals a resistance to facticity representative of the history of African enslavement in the Indian Ocean and preserves the legacy of African slavery’s longue durée in ways that resist its overpowering erasure in the popular and historical imagination. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

This book focuses on perspectives from and on the global south, providing fresh data and analyses on languages in African, Caribbean, Middle-Eastern and Asian tourism contexts. It provides a critical perspective on tourism in postcolonial and neocolonial settings, explored through in-depth case studies. The volume offers a multifaceted view on how language commodifies, and is commodified in, tourism settings and considers language practices and discourse as a way of constructing identities, boundaries and places. It also reflects on academic practice and economic dynamics in a field that is characterised by social inequalities and injustice, and tourism as the world's largest industry enacting dynamic communicative, social and cultural transformations. The book will appeal to both undergraduate and postgraduate students of tourism studies, linguistics, literature, cultural history and anthropology, as well as researchers and professionals in these fields.

A social history of modern Iran 'from below' focused on subaltern groups and contextualised by developments within Middle Eastern and global history.

A masterfully researched and compelling history of Iran from 1501 to 2009 This history of modern Iran is not a survey in the conventional sense but an ambitious exploration of the story of a nation. It offers a revealing look at how events, people, and institutions are shaped by currents that sometimes reach back hundreds of years. The book covers the complex history of the diverse societies and economies of Iran against the background of dynastic changes, revolutions, civil wars, foreign occupation, and the rise of the Islamic Republic. Abbas Amanat combines chronological and thematic approaches, exploring events with lasting implications for modern Iran and the world. Drawing on diverse historical scholarship and emphasizing the twentieth century, he addresses debates about Iran’s culture and politics. Political history is the driving narrative force, given impetus by Amanat's decades of research and study. He layers the book with discussions of literature, music, and the arts; ideology and religion; economy and society; and cultural identity and heritage.