Urban and Visual Culture in Contemporary Iran: Non-visibility and the Politics of Everyday Presence

(Paperback)

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In Urban and Visual Culture in Contemporary Iran, Pedram Dibazar argues that everyday life in Iran is a rich domain of social existence and cultural production. Regular patterns of day-to-day practice in Iran are imbued with forms of expressivity that are unmarked and inconspicuous, but have remarkable critical value for a cultural study of contemporary society. Blended into the rhythms of everyday life are nonconformist modes of presence, subtle in their visibility and non-confrontational in their resistance to the established societal norms and structures. This volume is about such everyday tactics and creativity as lived in space, visualised in cultural forms and communicated through media. Through its analysis of familiar everyday experiences, Urban and Visual Culture in Contemporary Iran covers a wide range of ordinary practicessuch as walking, driving, shopping and doing or watching sportsand spatial conditionssuch as streets, cars, rooftops, shopping centres and stadiums. It also explores a variety of cultural formations, including film, photography, architecture, literature, visual arts, television and digital media. This book offers new ways of thinking about visual and urban cultures by highlighting a politics of everyday life that is conditioned on concerns over visibility and presence.

Reviews

How do people experience cities and media in their everyday lives How do they navigate their challenges and opportunities Pedram Dibazars book offers a refreshing take on the modalities of experiencing the urban and visual space in Iranin its streets, cars, rooftops, shopping centres and sportscapes. Urban and Visual Culture in Contemporary Iran is a welcome contribution to the study of cities and their citizens as they operate in the subtleties of the quotidian. * Asef Bayat, Bastian Professor of Global & Transnational Studies and Professor of Sociology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA *
From the humdrum to the carnevalesque and the subversive, Dibazar exposes how power, social practice and unruly creativity tie together the spatial and visual domains of everyday life in urban Iran, providing us with sophisticated insights into how people, places and things come together as society. * Rasmus Christian Elling, Associate Professor of Iranian Studies and Global Urban Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark *
This innovative study of urban Iran and visual culture offers powerful, new insights into the politics of visibility in cities. Dibazar develops a sophisticated theoretical framework through which to interpret architecture, film, media and everyday spatial practices. The result is not only a highly original analysis of contemporary Tehran, but also a conceptual toolkit for understanding the experience of cities everywhere. * Christoph Lindner, Professor of Urban Studies, University College London, UK *

Author Bio

Pedram Dibazar is a lecturer in the Humanities at Amsterdam University College and a researcher at Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.