835 Blackness in Iran (with Amy Motlagh) | My Last Book with Nicholas Boggs

Jacke Wilson (0:01)

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Jacke Wilson (1:34)

Hello. We tend to view things through a particular prism, don't we? For me, as I suspect for many Americans, that means it's hard to view slavery as anything other than the 400 years of slave ships coming from Africa to what became the United States, the Southern plantations, cotton, the wicked institution of slavery, the harshness of the conditions, the Civil War and emancipation. And it's hard to see blackness beyond its connection, its historical connection to slavery and its aftermath. We can zoom in and look at the Civil Rights Movement or the present day, or maybe we can view another slice of history, like the role of the Caribbean Islands or the anti-slavery movement in England, which are satellites to the major understanding that looms so large. But trying to imagine slavery in, let's say, ancient Greece, has always been an uneasy fit in my mind, which is so dominated by the paradigms of history and culture that are closest to me. It's as if I need to shake the Etch A Sketch to erase everything I bring to the dialogue, and I have to start over. Slavery that's not based on race, that isn't about the South, that didn't lead to the Civil War, that doesn't touch America or American history.

Today's guest offers a chance to shake that Etch A Sketch, although in some ways the picture doesn't disappear, but serves as a kind of overlay. Her subjects are the cultural history of race and slavery in Iran. How does a country that's not America view those concepts? What can their relationship with Blackness teach us about Iranian culture and about our own view of Blackness here in the United States? That's a chance to understand something important in a new way. The Etch A Sketch is clear and we can start afresh. And yet, in our guest's book, it's not quite clear because she also looks at the diaspora. The Iranians who left Iran grew up elsewhere, maybe in America, where views of slavery and Blackness were shaped by the forces I described at the beginning. How do those individuals with roots in Iran and with sensibilities informed by living outside Iran perceive race and slavery? How has that affected the dialogue? And how, which is of particular interest to us, do cultural productions, cinema, folklore, ethnography, and yes, literature, reveal what Iran thinks about race, and what it thinks it thinks about race, and what we all can learn from that? Amy Motlagh and her book Colorblind, today on The History of Literature.

Okay, here we go, welcome to the podcast, I'm Jacke Wilson. This is the last of our in advance episodes that I'm posting while Emma and I celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary in the Bel Paisa, Italy. I'm sure by now, I'm fully rested and ready to return to the posting schedule with some great new episodes. The calendar looking ahead is already giving me goosebumps. Ghosts will be coming up soon for October, and Aristotle and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Oh Look, a history of the romance novel. We'll also look at Jessica Mitford soon and the dominance of French literary theory on English departments in the 1980s and 90s. I can't wait. We'll have a last book today by James Baldwin's biographer Nicholas Boggs. Will he choose a book by Baldwin or go with something else? Here's a little treat. He tells us what James Baldwin's choice was for his last book, the last book he would ever read. It kind of surprised me. Maybe it will surprise you as well. So stick around for that. I want to thank all our Patreon members who have signed up at patreon.com/literature.