In The Color Black, Beeta Baghoolizadeh traces the twin processes of enslavement and erasure of Black people in Iran during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She illustrates how geopolitical changes and technological advancements in the nineteenth century made enslaved East Africans uniquely visible in their servitude in wealthy and elite Iranian households. During this time, Blackness, Africanness, and enslavement became intertwined—and interchangeable—in Iranian imaginations. After the end of slavery in 1929, the implementation of abolition involved an active process of erasure on a national scale, such that a collective amnesia regarding slavery and racism persists today. The erasure of enslavement resulted in the erasure of Black Iranians as well. Baghoolizadeh draws on photographs, architecture, theater, circus acts, newspapers, films, and more to document how the politics of visibility framed discussions around enslavement and abolition during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this way, Baghoolizadeh makes visible the people and histories that were erased from Iran and its diaspora.

Beeta Baghoolizadeh is an Associate Research Scholar at Columbia University’s Middle East Institute.

List of Illustrations  ix
Note on Transliteration  xi
Note on Photography  xiii
Acknowledgments  xv
Introduction  1
Part I. Enslavement  25
1. Geographies of Blackness and Enslavement  27
2. Limits in Family and Photography  44
3. Portraits of Eunuchs and Their Afterlives  67
Part II. Erasure  93
4. Histories of a Country That Never Enslaved  95
5. Origins of Blackface in the Absence of Black People  115
6. Memories and a Genre of Distortion  133
Epilogue: Black Life in the Aftermath of a Forced Invisibility  149
Notes  163
Bibliography  203
Index  221