Gulistan in Black and White

Abstract

This paper takes the late Qajar court and harem as a historically specific site through which we can examine the complex and diverse histories of slavery within the region in the nineteenth century, as well as the ways in which hierarchies of race, gender, and sex functioned as constitutive elements of this institution. I examine a particular albeit very elite site, Nasir al-Din Shah’s harem, occupied by a variety of enslaved and formerly enslaved constituents who were a product of the evolving slave trade. The essay ends by zooming in on the lives (and afterlives) of two eunuchs, Aziz Khan and Agha Bahram, who were part of the servant class of Gulistan Palace during Nasir al-Din Shah’s reign, and whose life trajectories offer us some insight into the racial and gendered legacies of late nineteenth-century slavery in Iran.