A presentation by Cal Margulis
Thursday, November 5, 201511:00 AM - 1:00 PM
Bunche Hall 11372
Historians who are interested in explaining the lives of people of
African descent in Iran face a number of challenges, and perhaps the
greatest of these is a lack of good sources. Official census records
and British Foreign Office documents give broad outlines of the size
and distribution of the population, and memoirs and official histories
can be mined for stories of Africans who served in palaces and elite
households. But finding information on the tens of thousands of
Africans who toiled in less prestigious circumstances has been much
harder. My work bridges this gap by analyzing 186 English-language
travel narratives written by British and American citizens who came to
Iran during the Qajar Period. Historians of Iran have long recognized
the importance of this category of documents, yet to this date only
two dozen or so of the most famous ones are in regular use. This is
particularly sad given the astounding breadth of the travelers’
experiences. These men and women mingled with the richest and poorest
Iranians in both urban and rural settings in virtually every province,
often writing in vivid detail about subjects that Iranian writers
would have balked at mentioning at all. I show that these narratives
are a deep, rich source for information on the everyday lives of
Iranians of African descent—male and female, slave and free. These
stories are not written by the Africans themselves, of course, and are
still embedded within the writers’ own cultural contexts. Yet when
placed alongside the governmental and elite Iranian documentation that
is most often our window into this world, this corpus can at least
help to provide a more balanced portrayal of what life was like for
this too often misunderstood people. In addition, I hope that my use
of these documents will serve to underscore their importance for
scholars of Iran who focus on other subjects, as well.