Micropolitics of archives: Tehran's cinematic depictions of the (urban) self

This article draws on the ‘postcolonial’ awareness that reading cities on their own is not possible without also exploring the cultural archives of the urban imagination in different locations. To further advance this idea, I suggest that the surgical exploration of archives – more specifically, interrogating how the self and the other have been defined in them – should be incorporated as a key step in our urban genealogical readings of new geographies. The study of conceptions of the urban self in the cultural products of Tehran, for the period from the 1960s to the 1970s, reveals an unwitting reproduction of the nuances of colonialist tendencies in representational efforts directed towards ‘decolonisation’ (i.e., resistance films). These works, which have been key referents for understanding Iranian modernity, create a ‘negative identity’ by ignoring lived experiences in their locations, resulting in products that ironically contribute to self-colonising processes. I argue that this negligence took place due to a deeply ingrained practice of defining the self by its difference to an ‘other’. Therefore, I suggest, in order to enable the emergence of ‘decolonised’ situated theories from new locations, we need to extend the geographies of ‘postcolonial’ thinking via a fine-grained examination of (resistance) representational work – that is, to move from focusing on global power relations to local microhistories and the micropolitics of archives. Without this move, the colonialist conceptions of ‘cityness’ will endure in the formation of our new theories.