Archives Beyond Inhabitation

I excavate archives of ‘inhabitation beyond capitalism’ in Tehran by exploring public cultural texts and films produced during the 1960s and 1970s. Narrating from the standpoint of every day of city life, these works show a strong desire to move beyond ‘western’ capitalism towards more ‘humane’ urban and social life. They criticise the ongoing transformations of their time, interpreting those as ‘unjust’, ‘machinic’ and ‘inhuman’ suggesting creating societies by drawing inspirations from Persian poetry and Sufism. I explore these works as liberating practices and moments beyond inhabitation created in the representational realm. The concept of Persian Literary Humanism, suggested by Hamid Dabashi, is a key analytical theme in my work. This type of humanism redirects “the presumption of the knowing self to the certainty of an unknown alterity” – this is where the subject is “forever decentred” (Dabashi, 2012: 27). I will more specifically focus on The House is Black, a short film by Forough Farrokhzad, a poet and filmmaker, to show how she (re)creates such humanism from a location of ‘absence’ and in a place of uninhabitable (Roulstone, 2008). Her film is about people with leprosy who live segregated from society. She highlights the ‘ugly’ daily reality of their illness, visualises the invisible, and breaches the borders created by the presence of a contagious illness. Analytically, my work is inspired by Edward Said’s approach when he reveals the historical experience of imperialism through genealogical reading of cultural archives (Said, 1994). In this approach, the archive is a lively practice which creating imaginaries is dialectically intertwined with the present experience of places and peoples.

Dabashi H (2012) The World of Persian Literary Humanism. Cambridge: Harvard University.

Roulstone K (2008) Rethinking Absence. In: Kokoli AM (ed.) Feminism Reframed. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, pp. 86–106.

Said E (1994) Culture and Imperialism. NewYork: Vintage.