Events
The Color Black: Enslavement and Erasure in Iran
Book talk with Beeta Baghoolizadeh
Apr 24, 2025 at – | Annenberg School for Communication room 111
The Middle East Center is hosting Beeta Baghoolizadeh for a book talk on The Color Black: Enslavement and Erasure in Iran.
In The Color Black, Beeta Baghoolizadeh traces the twin processes of enslavement and erasure of Black people in Iran during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She illustrates how geopolitical changes and technological advancements in the nineteenth century made enslaved East Africans uniquely visible in their servitude in wealthy and elite Iranian households. During this time, Blackness, Africanness, and enslavement became intertwined—and interchangeable—in Iranian imaginations. After the end of slavery in 1929, the implementation of abolition involved an active process of erasure on a national scale, such that a collective amnesia regarding slavery and racism persists today. The erasure of enslavement resulted in the erasure of Black Iranians as well. Baghoolizadeh draws on photographs, architecture, theater, circus acts, newspapers, films, and more to document how the politics of visibility framed discussions around enslavement and abolition during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this way, Baghoolizadeh makes visible the people and histories that were erased from Iran and its diaspora.
The Landscapes of Exile in Pre-Modern Persian Poetry
April 21, 2025, 5:30pm
Rethinking Archives on Afghanistan
April 11, 2025, 1:00pm – 2:30pm
What does archival work mean in Afghanistan and its diasporas? What can institutional archives tell us about ways of knowing Afghanistan amid consecutive and concurrent wars, migration, and diasporic (trans)formations in the 20th and 21st century?
In Conversation: Hidden Liberalism in Iran
Register at this linkLinks to an external site. to attend this event on Wednesday, April 2 at 3:45pm.
Join Dr. Hussein Banai and Dr. Mahyar Entezari for an engaging discussion of Hidden Liberalism in Modern Iran, a groundbreaking work that sheds new light on Iran’s political evolution in the 19th and 20th centuries. Banai’s innovative concept of “hidden liberalism” challenges traditional views by exploring how liberal thought has persisted in Iran despite its complicated relationship with Western imperialism and local political realities. The conversation will delve into key themes from the book, including the burden of liberalism in postcolonial settings and how Iran’s intellectual culture has grappled with liberalism’s perceived foreignness. Don’t miss this opportunity to explore the deeper, often overlooked currents of liberal thought shaping Iran’s political landscape.
Nowruz CelebrationFilm Screening with Persis Karim
Film Screening with Persis Karim
“The Dawn Is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life” — a 55-min. documentary shares the complex personal and social histories that have brought Iranians to the San Francisco Bay Area for more than fifty years.
Based on the stories of 8 individuals who live, work, and contribute to life and culture of the San Francisco Bay Area, “The Dawn Is Too Far” portrays the history of local Iranian Americans and the challenges they have faced as a group struggling to find acceptance and understanding in the long shadow of larger political and historical events. This film has an immediate connection with the larger Iranian American community in California and across the US, as well as other immigrant and diaspora groups. This film has the potential to spark urgent conversations about American identity in a time of growing fear and divisiveness.
This film explores the history, struggles, and impact of four generations of Iranian immigrants to the Bay Area, despite having been continuously “othered” by the tense relationship between the US and Iranian governments and negative media headlines since 1979. It captures the resilient and complex character of this immigrant community, its challenges and successes, as well as the ways it has contributed to the Bay Area’s culture and communities.
Persis Karim is the Chair/Director of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University where she also teaches Comparative and World Literature.
Armen Davoudian & Fatemeh Shams
A reading and conversation
Hosted by Julieta Vittore Dutto
Thursday, September 5, 5:30 PM
Kelly Writers House | 3805 Locust Walk
Watch live on YouTube
Register here to attend in person
We warmly invite you to join us for a reading and conversation with Iranian poets and translators Armen Davoudian and Dr. Fatemeh Shams hosted by Julieta Vittore Dutto. In addition to being an internationally acclaimed, award-winning poet, Shams is an intersectional feminist activist and Associate Professor of Persian literature at Penn. Her latest publication, translated to English from Persian by Davoudian, is Hopscotch, in which she crafts a vivid liminal world of Berlin-based poems, a canvas where home and exile blur into an intimate middle ground. Shams’s poetry invites us to consider our own places of belonging and the potential spaces we inhabit—those rich intersections of language and lived experience.
Davoudian is the author of the debut poetry collection The Palace of Forty Pillars. In Isfahan, Iran, the eponymous palace has only twenty pillars—but, reflected in its courtyard pool, they become forty. This is the gamble of Davoudian’s magical, ruminative poems: to recreate, in art’s reflection, a home for the speaker, who is unable to return to it in life.
Please register here to attend in person.
Katz Center Thirtieth Anniversary Concert
The Music of Resilience: Songs of Jewish Survival East and West
Sunday, April 14, 3:00 PM
American Philosophical Society
Benjamin Franklin Hall
427 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia
Free and open to the public, registration required
To mark its thirtieth birthday, the Katz Center presents a concert exploring Jewish musical culture from different parts of the world, East and West. This sonic tribute to Jewish survival and cultural vitality features songs nearly lost to memory but now brought to life by extraordinary musical scholars.
Act I: Yiddish Glory
Lost and Found Songs of Soviet Jews during World War II
Featuring Anna Shternshis and Psoy Korolenko
Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Psoy Korolenko (Dartmouth College) and historian Anna Shternshis (University of Toronto) bring to life long lost Yiddish songs of World War II in this all-new concert and lecture program. Collected by Moisei Beregovsky and other scientists of the Kiev Cabinet for Jewish Culture, these Yiddish songs were confiscated and hidden by the Soviet government in 1949, and have only recently come to light. They tell stories of how Soviet Jews lived and died under the German occupation, used music to document Nazi atrocities, fought in the Red Army, worked on the home front, and made sense of it all through Yiddish music. None of these songs were known until they were accidentally discovered in the basement of the Ukrainian National Library in the 1990s. The performance of these materials gives voice to Soviet Jewish women, children, and men who never got to tell their stories but left us their incredible songs.
Act II: Monajat
An Intergenerational Remix of Persian Jewish Songs
Featuring Galeet Dardashti with Shanir Blumenkranz, Philip Mayer, Zafer Tawil, and Max ZT
Galeet Dardashti’s multi-sensory project and album, Monajat, is inspired by old and haunting recordings of Jewish prayers chanted by her late grandfather, Younes Dardashti, a famous master singer of Persian classical music in 1950s/60s Iran. Galeet reinvents the ancient ritual of Selihot by singing with remixed samples of her grandfather’s legacy recordings. Riffing on these old tapes, Galeet composes a soundscape of original music performed by an ensemble of acclaimed Middle Eastern and jazz musicians. Dynamic video art created by artist/designer Dmitry Kemell envelopes the audience, bringing listeners into the ritual. This powerful project is both deeply Jewish and deeply Persian at a time of tremendous antisemitism and Islamophobia.