Parisa Vaziri

Overview

Parisa Vaziri received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from U.C. Irvine in 2018. Her work engages legacies of Indian Ocean world slavery in the long durée through prisms of visual media. Her research overlaps interests in critical theory, black studies, Middle Eastern cultural production, postcolonial critiques of history, film theory, new media, philosophy, anthropology, and histories of displinary formation more generally. Her current project recovers articulations of blackness in Iranian visual culture, primarily through the media of experimental documentary and art cinema. She proposes film as a site of transmission that disrupts traditional periodization schemes and that elucidates problems of temporality and geography in orthdox narratives about the concept of race. 

Two of her forthcoming publications position the history of experimental ethnographic documentary as supplement and stimulant to the Iranian New Wave film movement, while exploring how filmic blackness allegorizes modernity's spatial and temporal disjunctions. In 2016, she published "Windridden" on spirit rituals practiced by slave-descendent communities around the Persian Gulf, suggesting that belief systems such as zar simulate a metaphysical relation to history that pose questions for Western-derived assumptions of self, subjectivity, and historicity.  “Blackness and the Metaethics of the Object,” published in Rhizomes in 2016, explores the legacy of Frantz Fanon in current scholarly debates in black studies through an inquiry about the power of dissolution when methodological forces (poststructuralist theory and critiques of structural violence) converge.

Office Hours- Fall 2018

Monday, Wednesday 3:00-4:00pm