Lurking, trespassing, hiding and going astray are aspects of modern urban life explored in literature, popular arts and social critique everywhere. The restless subject, embodying the fear and frustration of the time, is a classical figure that moves through the Hobbesian asphalt jungle, experiencing its differentiated geographies, encountering its gendered, classist and state-coerced spaces. Fear can limit mobility and frustration can propel bodies to the dark interstices of the city, or even to transgress its internal borders. Defiant or aimless, these acts of movement beneath the skin of the city are part and parcel of the lived experience in societies undergoing rapid change and reconfiguration.
This paper explores the ways that the city of Tehran has been represented at different stages of its modern history: as a stage for individual struggles, and as a terrain of fear and frustration. Examples will be drawn from different time periods and from different media: the early 1920s (Moshfeq-e Kazemi’s novel Tehran-e Makhuf), the late 1970s (Fereydun Gole’s movies Zir-e pust-e shab and Kandu and Parviz Sayyad’s Bon-bast), and the early 2010s (rap music, particularly Hichkas’ album Jangal-e sfâlt).
From this diverse body of work, I will analyze a set of common themes and tropes, connected through an evolving vocabulary of spatially mediated emotions. The paper gives particular attention to how certain spaces – the dead-end, the back alley, the square, the café – are felt, sensed, understood and presented as nodal points in modern Tehran’s changing societal cartography.
