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1 results

  • Chapter 8 - Slavery and the Virtual Archive: On Iran’s Dāsh Ākul

  • from Part III - Legacies and Afterlives
  • Edited by Laura Murphy, Sheffield Hallam University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Global Literature and Slavery
    Published online:
    15 December 2022
    Print publication:
    22 December 2022, pp 135-149

  • Summary

    Traditionally underexplored by historians of modern Iran, over the past few years slavery in Iran has become a recognizable subject of historiographic inquiry. Taking as an example the transmediation of a Persian legend (Dāsh Ākul) into literary fiction, and then film, this chapter explores the limits and contradictions of slavery’s historical recovery. In the cinematic version of Dāsh Ākul, the narrative foe Kākā Rustam wears blackface, reactivating a historical detail lost in Sadeq Hedayat’s famous short story of the same name published forty years prior. In Masūd Kīmīā’ī’s 1971 film, Kākā Rustam’s blackface recalls the fact that he was the child of African slaves, witness to his parents’ brutal murder at the hands of their master. This chapter argues that the various transformations and distortions that occur through the medial transmission of Dāsh Ākul illustrate how distortion is constitutive of, rather than merely contingent to slavery’s archive.