This post is dedicated to Asad Haider, who left us few days ago, whose scholarship continues to enable difficult recognitions, and to Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi (1936-1985), whose stories remain dangerous precisely because they make visible what power requires remain unseen.

 

I’m a doctoral researcher working on the politics and aesthetics of utopia. My dissertation examines how Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi’s works create utopian horizons in contemporary Iran—spaces where alternative forms of seeing, being, and becoming are made possible, even under authoritarian conditions.

In my previous post, I wrote about Asad Haider as a teacher and guide. Here, I want to reflect on how his scholarship shaped my dissertation as a committee member—and what I learned from his passing about refusing to unsee what we’ve learned to see.

The Question That Shattered Everything

I first encountered Asad’s thoughts through his book Mistaken Identity. What caught my attention immediately was how it offered a coherent framework within Marxist thought—one that neither divorces itself from revolutionary politics nor abandons conversations about race. But what truly shattered my world was his discussion of whiteness.

Growing up in Iran, I’d assumed race was something other places had. Then Asad argued that whiteness itself was invented—that “when the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no white people there.” The category was created through specific laws to prevent solidarity between laborers. What Theodore Allen called “the invention of the white race” emerged through legal and economic arrangements designed to fracture working-class unity.

What struck me most was his recovery of the original meaning of “identity politics,” tracing it back to the Combahee River Collective. For those women, identity politics meant recognizing that “the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity”—but this recognition was always tied to anticapitalist struggle and collective liberation, never to the liberal individualism that would later capture the phrase.

If whiteness was invented… what did that mean for Iran? What did it mean for me?

Dandil:The Story That Made Me See

 

I was deep into analyzing Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi’s 1966 short stories for my dissertation. The story of “Dandil” fascinated me the most, as this story makes the question of whiteness impossible to ignore.

The story centers on Tamara, a fifteen-year-old girl brought to Dandil—a slum on the outskirts of a military town—by her father Ayyub. The community understands immediately what she represents: not a person but a commodity.

Zeinal, one of the local men who will serve as intermediary, reports to the others what he’s seen:

“She’s around fifteen but her body is very full, like a twenty-year-old woman—white, dark eyes and eyebrows, curly hair… when you look at her she drops her eyes like a child. She’s the type young men really like… pretty and shy. She’s even studied seven or eight grades, knows English. I don’t know how Ayyub managed to convince her. She’s perfect for foreign customers.“

The description is precise in its market logic. Tamara’s fairness (sefid) comes first—her most valuable quality. Then her youth, her fullness, her education, her shyness. Each attribute increases her price.

This wasn’t a metaphor. This was a structural analysis through aesthetic experience. Sa’edi was showing me something about how power operates through positions rather than individual actors.

The Photography

When the community decides to photograph Tamara, they’re not fulfilling a customer’s request. They’re creating a catalog. The idea comes from Asadollah, the local policeman:

“That’s easy—bring a photographer and take her picture… If you have her photograph, I’ll tell you who to approach.”

The photographer sets up in the courtyard. Tamara comes out in a red skirt and white blouse, a flower in her hair, holding a bouquet. She asks the photographer how to pose. She’s performing availability—at fifteen, she’s already learned how to present herself for consumption.

Then, mid-photograph, she sees them:

“Tamara suddenly cried out with a loud laugh: ‘Look at these! Who are all these people!’ Startled, she jumped up from the chair… They saw the Dandilis perched on the walls in their ragged clothes, disheveled, staring at everything happening in Khanomi’s courtyard.”

The entire community has positioned itself on walls and rooftops to watch. A distribution of positions enabling extraction. The men elevated by architecture, surveilling. Tamara positioned below, available for consumption.

But here’s what arrests me: Sa’edi tells us she laughs as she cries out. Not a scream of horror. A laugh. Is this the laugh of a fifteen-year-old who doesn’t fully understand her situation? A defense mechanism? Or something more terrible—the laugh of someone who has already learned to perform availability even in the moment of recognizing her own objectification?

Sa’edi doesn’t tell us. He makes us sit with the ambiguity and discover our own complicity. We are positioned on those rooftops, too.

The Sexual Economy as Transaction

The photograph isn’t the transaction—it’s the advertisement. The transaction comes later, when an American soldier from the nearby military base arrives.

Sa’edi describes the community’s preparation with meticulous detail. They clean the alleys. They cover the sewage ditch. They hang lanterns. They set up a table with food and foreign liquor. Asadollah, the policeman, instructs them:

“You need to understand—this American isn’t like us. He has civilization. He’s American… If you want him to come here, everything must suit his taste. Don’t worry about expenses—these people swim in money. Wherever they go they spend like water… But you have to honor him properly. If you don’t treat him well, if he leaves in the middle, we’ll all lose.”

The entire community reorganizes itself around the foreign consumer’s comfort. Children are hidden. The village madman (Keshmat) is locked away. Tamara’s father—who has been weeping throughout the story—is pushed into the ruins, out of sight. His tears must not disrupt the performance.

When the American arrives, the whole town watches:

“A few moments later, even the rooftops of Dandil were filled with spectators.”

The American performs for his audience. He drops Asadollah’s cap, laughs, and makes gestures. When he sees the crowd, he charges at them playfully, drops to his knees, slaps his thighs, shouts “Yo ho! Yo ho ho ho!” The crowd retreats into darkness, then surges back, cheering.

This is the spectacle of imperial power. The American body is entertainment. His presence transforms the slum into a theatre. Everyone has a role: the American as consumer-performer, the community as audience-facilitators, and Tamara as commodity.

Plunder, Not Purchase

The morning after, the American leaves. He walks out whistling, past the coffeehouse, past the men who arranged everything. When Khanomi’s assistant asks if he’s paid, the answer is no.

Panjak, trembling from withdrawal, confronts Asadollah:

“‘Hey Asadollah, Asadollah—you didn’t let us settle with him beforehand. Now you tell him to pay. It’s our fault for honoring him, for not taking the money upfront. You said it would offend him. Now you tell him… tell him to pay.’

Asadollah, backing away, said: ‘No, Panjak, you can’t say anything to him. You can’t ask him for money. He’s not like you and me. He’s American—if he gets upset, if he’s offended, he’ll destroy all of Dandil, massacre everyone.‘”

This is the story’s devastating conclusion. Tamara wasn’t bought—she was plundered.

The American consumer is consumed without compensation, and the community cannot even articulate a complaint. The threat of violence guarantees the extraction. This is colonialism in its purest form: not unequal exchange but taking without return, backed by the implicit promise of destruction.

And throughout this final scene, Tamara’s father sits in the ruins, weeping. He has been weeping since his daughter arrived in Dandil. He knows precisely what is happening—and he is utterly powerless to stop it.

What Asad’s Scholarship Exposed

Asad’s work gave me language for what Sa’edi had shown visually. If whiteness was invented to prevent solidarity—to create artificial divisions maintaining extraction—then what about sefidi (fairness/whiteness) in Iran?

I started seeing the pattern everywhere in Iranian cinema and literature. Fair-skinned women are marked as desirable, valuable, worthy of protection, and therefore marketable to those with the power to purchase. 

Darker-skinned women were marked as available, common, unworthy of consideration. A distribution of value mapped onto skin color. Not identical to American racial categories, but structurally performing similar work: maintaining hierarchies, preventing solidarity, enabling extraction.

The women of Dandil demonstrate this painfully. When they hear about Tamara, they come to inspect her—not as allies but as competitors:

“Qomri said: ‘She’s probably found some diseased wretch again and is showing off.’… Bibi said: ‘Khanomi’s tricks have shut down everyone’s business in Dandil… she intercepts every good customer before they reach the rest of us.’”

The system operates to position women against each other rather than in solidarity. Tamara’s fairness doesn’t protect her—it makes her more valuable for extraction while simultaneously making her a threat to the other women’s survival.

The Lesson Migration Taught: The Persistence of Police Order Across Spaces and Temporalities

When I migrated to Canada, I learned this lesson from a different position. Here, I discovered I was no more than what Tamara had been: a body whose labor could be assumed, extracted, dismissed. My “exotic” appearance justified treatment I would never have tolerated back home. In Iran, I had been positioned as desirable because of the fairness of my skin, which was protected and valued. In Canada, I was placed as available because “Middle Eastern woman”—a category carrying colonial histories of sexual availability. The photograph scene haunted me: Tamara positioned for foreign consumption while the community watches. My own experience: positioned on dating apps, viewed and evaluated by men who expected access, who were angry at boundaries, who vanished after extracting what they wanted.

And yet this new experience also shifted my perspective on my pre-migration life in Iran. What I had experienced as protection now revealed itself as another form of the same logic. The male relatives who “valued” my fairness, the discourse of protection that surrounded fair-skinned women, weren’t these really the internalization of colonial hierarchies? The same white male gaze that reduced me to “exotic” flesh in Canada had already been gazing in Iran, just under different masks. Was I ever valued for who I was, or was I always already reduced to my color, to “meat”—flesh separated from any organizing structure of genuine recognition?

This recognition revealed something more systematic. When the Islamic Republic replaced American soldiers with morality police in 1979, the positions enabling extraction remained: elevated surveillance, control over women’s bodies, and extraction remaining unaccountable. The men on Dandil’s rooftops became neighbourhood watch committees reporting “improper” hijab. The American soldier’s impunity transferred to Basij forces with the same guarantee: “If you complain, we’ll destroy everything.” When Mahsa Jina Amini died in 2022—a Kurdish woman whose “improper” hijab became a pretext for state violence—those police occupied positions structurally identical to those of American soldiers. The architecture persisted: elevated surveillance (rooftops → CCTV cameras monitoring hijab), categorization (“quality goods” vs. “trash” → “proper” vs. “improper” women), extraction without accountability (soldier leaves without paying → police kill without consequences).

And white men in Canada occupied positions structurally identical to both: elevated by citizenship and whiteness, surveilling and categorizing bodies marked “other,” extracting labor while remaining unaccountable. This recognition was devastating. It meant accepting my own contradictory positioning—benefiting from colorism in Iran while experiencing racialization in Canada—sometimes simultaneously. Like Tamara: elevated above other women because of fairness, yet utterly vulnerable to the soldier’s extraction. The protection was never protection. It was always surveillance.

Still, I struggled with how to write this. Iranian studies doesn’t embrace race-talk—colleagues dismiss it as importing American frameworks. Every time I presented this work, I encountered resistance: “Iran doesn’t have race.” “You’re imposing American categories.” “Sefid just means beautiful—you’re reading too much into language.” But Asad had taught me that ideology works through obviousness—through treating as natural what requires interrogation. When colleagues insisted “sefid just means beautiful,” they performed exactly what needs investigation: how does a word for color become synonymous with beauty?

The Crisis and Its Aftermath

Then Asad disappeared for months or a year. During his illness, when I most needed guidance, there was silence. I remember sitting at my desk, cursor hovering over my chapter “Utopia and Nationalism: Gender, Race and Border in Iran.” One delete command could erase months of work.

The delete key felt like relief. Each removed paragraph made the document safer. No more arguments about whether Iran “has race.” No more accusations. No more painful recognition of my own complicity. But I knew what I was really doing: erasing what I’d learned to see because seeing it hurt.

Then came news of Asad’s passing. The grief was immediate. But something else emerged: clarity. I had been waiting for external validation to authenticate my work. I had been treating Asad’s approval as necessary for scholarly legitimacy. This wasn’t what he taught me. Authenticity means taking responsibility for what you’ve come to see. I thought about Tamara—positioned for the camera while the entire community watches from rooftops. She couldn’t unsee that she was being watched. Sa’edi doesn’t let her—or us—have that luxury.

And I realized: wasn’t Asad’s disappearance necessary? If he were to teach me, I don’t need any master to validate my seeing; he had no choice but to get out of my way. I didn’t need Asad’s approval to know what I’d learned mattered. The structures were real, whether or not I could prove it to my field. Zeinal describes Tamara as “white” first because that’s what creates her value. The men position themselves on rooftops because elevated surveillance is how power operates. My responsibility wasn’t to get it perfectly right. It was to refuse the easier path of strategic dismissal.

When Mahsa Jina Amini died, and protests erupted under “Women, Life, Freedom”, I saw the framework in action. The movement didn’t ask for better hijab policies. It challenged the positions themselves: the surveillance architecture, the control over women’s bodies, and the structures persisting regardless of who enforces them. Protestors could see what Sa’edi showed in 1966: replacing the American soldier with the morality policeman changes nothing if positions enabling extraction remain.

What Asad Taught Me: The Abolition of Rooftops

Revolutions fail when they replace police while maintaining positions enabling extraction. The 1979 revolution expelled American imperialism but maintained structural positions: elevated surveillance, control over women’s bodies, and extraction remaining unaccountable. American soldiers who consumed Tamara and morality police who killed Mahsa Jina Amini occupy structurally identical positions. Different police, different justifications, same distributions. This is why Sa’edi’s work remains provocative in both monarchy and theocracy. His stories make visible that positions persist regardless of who occupies them.

But Sa’edi doesn’t just expose these structures—he transforms us into what Rancière calls “emancipated spectators.” He doesn’t tell us what to think about surveillance or extraction. Instead, he positions us on those rooftops watching Tamara, forces us to recognize our complicity, and trusts us to synthesize what this means. This is the revolution within revolution: not replacing who delivers political messages, but dismantling the pedagogical positions that assume spectators need instruction rather than invitation to see.

When protestors burned headscarves and cut their hair, they weren’t just protesting hijab laws. They were refusing the positions themselves—and becoming emancipated actors rather than waiting for revolutionary vanguards to lead them. Sa’edi showed us in 1966 what revolutionary movements took decades to articulate: you cannot achieve liberation by replacing who watches from the rooftops. You must dismantle the rooftops themselves. And you cannot achieve emancipation by replacing who teaches the masses. You must trust the intelligence already present in those positioned as ignorant.

Asad’s passing taught me that authenticity doesn’t require external validation. It requires facing what you’ve learned to see and refusing to unsee it. There are no guarantees. The framework could be wrong. The connections are incomplete. The dissertation could fail. But the alternative—erasing recognitions because they’re painful—would mean betraying what Asad taught me: that ideology works through obviousness, that what feels natural often requires the most interrogation. He taught me to be an emancipated thinker, not a faithful disciple.

This is how we honour teachers and writers: not by preserving their words unchanged, but by using their tools for work they didn’t live to see. The work continues even when it means recognizing my contradictory positioning—benefiting from some hierarchies while experiencing exploitation through others—sometimes simultaneously, as Tamara does, because the only actual failure would be to stop seeing what I’ve learned to see.

When Tamara cries out—”Look at these! Who are all these people?”—discovering the entire community perched on walls watching, I cannot unsee what Sa’edi made visible: the structure of watching, the economy of fairness, the architecture of surveillance, the persistence of positions across operator changes.

Asad taught me to see. But more importantly, he taught me to trust what I see, to take responsibility for my own seeing, to refuse the comfort of waiting for masters to validate my recognitions. The work continues. Not as monument to his memory, but as living practice—honoring him by refusing to unsee what his teaching made visible. Even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts. Because pain isn’t evidence of error. Sometimes it’s evidence we’re finally seeing clearly.

The work is to abolish the rooftops themselves. Not to replace who stands on them, but to dismantle the elevated positions that make surveillance and extraction possible. Not to replace who teaches, but to recognize the intelligence in every position marked as ignorant. The abolition of rooftops means the abolition of all positions that elevate some while positioning others as available for extraction.