ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the vexed relationship between the development of Iranian ethnography, Iranian New Wave and Persian literary modernity through the trope of the African slave descendent tradition, zar. Naṣir Taqvā’ī and Ghulām-Husayn Sā‘idī, among other Iranian authors and filmmakers, thematise zar in writings and films of the 1960s. Mining Taqvā’ī and Sā‘idī’s oeuvres Vaziri argues that the encounter with zar exceeds the order of eventuality; she tracks it throughout these authors’ subsequent works. Retroactively, zar, as a primitive figure for madness, produces coherence for the modernness of Iranian anxiety and alienation in New Wave films and modernist writings. This coherence depends upon the dissolution of zar’s historicity, that is, its relation to the African slave trade. The particularity of this ethnographic encounter thus elicits questions about how to navigate the ethical implications of abstraction in modernist translations of Iranian ethnography.
