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Race and the Aesthetics of Alterity in Mahshid Amirshahi’s Dadeh Qadam-Kheyr

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Amirhossein Vafa
Amirhossein Vafa*
Affiliation:
The Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Shiraz University
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Abstract

Focusing on black women Qadam-Kheyr and Sorur in Mahshid Amirshahi’s novel Dadeh Qadam-Kheyr (1999), this article examines literary representations of the African-Iranian presence, and provides a critique of race and slavery in twentieth-century Iran. In light of the history of the Iranian slave trade until 1928, and the reconstruction of race and gender identities along Eurocentric lines of nationalism in Iran, the novel under scrutiny is a dynamic site of struggle between an “Iranian” literary discourse and its “non-Persian” Others. The “aesthetics of alterity” at the heart of the text is, therefore, the interplay between the repressed title-character Qadam-Kheyr and the resilient minor character Sorur, each registering Amirshahi’s artistic intervention into a forgotten corner of Iranian history.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , January 2018 , pp. 141 - 160
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 Association For Iranian Studies, Inc

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Footnotes

Amirhossein Vafa would like to thank Goli Emami and Manijeh Abdollahi for their insight and encouragement in the development of this article, and the anonymous reviewers at Iranian Studies for their assessment and helpful comments.

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