Beeta Baghoolizadeh
Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies, Bucknell University
BGC Research Fellow, September–December 2020

In this three-part pop-up course, Dr. Beeta Baghoolizadeh will discuss the making and erasing of race and racial markers in Iran during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Despite centuries of enslaving Central Asian, Caucasian, South Asian, and East African peoples within Iran, the term slave came to evoke the image of enslaved East Africans in the Iranian imaginary by the late nineteenth century. Blackness, in turn, became synonymous with enslavement, despite the many examples of free East Africans in Iran. This pop-up course charts the changing meanings of Blackness during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the lens of slavery and abolition in three parts: the changing geographies of enslavement, the advent of the camera and memorialization projects in Iran, and finally, the framing of blackface minstrelsy in the absence of slavery.