Place names are a critical part of the meaning making process, and provide information about the inhabitants of the city and their values. Official street renaming is a means of legitimizing sovereignty and reinforcing authority (Azaryahu, 1996&2011) through dominating urban space and creating a collective memory by municipalities (Oto-Peralis, 2018). It is one manifestation of the reconfiguring of both space and history (Duncan, 2004). For this study, I view street names in Mashhad, Iran, as ‘memorial arenas’ that indicate the existence of multiple layers of stories that appeal to memory, both by their visibility on street signs and by their invisibility as former names. My work especially focuses on two aspects of street naming: 1) How referring to street names is a matter of everyday practice for local residents; 2) How street names indicate hegemonic space appropriation by the Mashhad Municipality as an administrative arm of the post-1979 governance that omits, adds and substitutes street signs. I use data from my Summer 2018 participant observation in Mashhad and interviews with local residents, who consciously or subconsciously defy these hegemonic street signs. Using the concept of ‘spatial practices and constructed order’ by De Certeau (1984), I explore the multiplicity of local accounts about the streets of Mashhad, as opposed to the one prevalent official construction that is reproduced through official addresses, maps, phone book listings, and of course the street signs themselves. For instance, local residents of the now-named Imam Khomeini street still call this street as Adl and as Adl-e Pahlavi: originally named Adl-e Pahlavi (meaning Pahlavi Justice), it was officially renamed to Adl-e Khomeini after 1979. Noticing people skip Khomeini’s name, the municipality omitted the word Adl and renamed the street as Imam Khomeini in the 1990s, all of which became a matter of ridicule for local residents. I argue that in the urban context where the street signs carry official names as the accepted framework, the additional accounts insert themselves to challenge the hegemony of the constructed order of these names. The result is the local stories, satirical accounts circulated on social media, lists of original street names on websites, pedestrians who call the streets by their former names as a sign of local-ness, and extensive discussions generated among taxi passengers who comment on street names. I analyze these stories as special practices of everyday life that prevent the official version of history being rendered as natural.

Tehran, Iran—February 12, 1979: under a photograph of the entrance to Qasr prison, an article in Ittila’at newspaper offers a minute-by-minute report on the “fall of the regime,” including the seizing of the capital’s three main prisons by armed protestors. Responding to a reporter’s question about the future of the Prisons, notorious as the primary detention centers for opponents of the Shah’s regime, a former political prisoner stated: “parts of these prisons can be used for their regular function, however the torture rooms and the isolation cells should be preserved as they are, and be opened to public viewing like Bastille prison in France, so that the people can see the catastrophic past with their own eyes.” Twenty-three years later, that memorialization started to be realized. Beginning with the opening of the Ebrat Museum in 2002 and followed by that of the Museum of the Qasr Prison in 2012, the Pahlavi regime’s sites of political imprisonment and torture have been museumified and monumentalized. Focusing on Qasr prison museum—initially constructed as a palace under Qajar rule, which was then transformed into a prison under the Pahlavi state—this paper addresses the relatively new phenomenon of the prison museum in Iran and aims to evaluate this new form of transfuntional monumental space. By dealing with the nation’s recent history, these transformations serve several functions for the Iranian state: they help to ensure the state’s legitimacy by publicizing the disappearance of political prisons, and therefore of political opposition; at the same time, they display the freedom of speech and critical political activity. But these transformations are not only physical; in the way they are managed, in the attempt at their sacralization—such as by burying newly-found remains of soldiers of the Iran-Iraq war on the grounds of Qasr—and in the carefully observed codes of conduct—such as regulating photography—these intricately arranged monumental sites are caught between being public and private, exhibiting and hiding, remembering and forgetting.

When the contents of archives are closed to the public and scholars for privacy and security concerns, the collection is labeled as being “dark.” The presentation addresses one such archive, the Kanan Makiya Papers currently housed, but closed in 2017, at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The Kanan Makiya Papers contains the life’s work of Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi exile, close advisor to the Bush administration, and founder of the Iraq Memory Foundation. The documents contained in the Kanan Makiya Papers, which include contracts and communication with the Department of Defense, internal memoranda among the Iraqi opposition movement, and dialogues between Makiya and high ranking officials in the Bush administration, detail the capture of Ba’th Party archives in Iraq, their transfer to the United States, and their subsequent exploitation for scholarly and intelligence purposes. Importantly, the Kanan Makiya Papers also contains an array of documents detailing the formation of the Iraqi opposition movement after the 1991 Gulf War, their contacts with the American CIA and other government agencies, and their consequential role in the planning for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The Kanan Makiya Papers is thus a “dark” archive of the Ba’th Party archives, which, at the same time, is a “dark” archive of the wars in Iraq. What we learn from the Kanan Makiya Papers is how knowledge production about Ba’thist Iraq is curated by the politics of going to war with Iraq. Being that we are the only two scholars to have examined and digitized this collection in detail—the first part of our presentation reviews the contents of the Makiya papers. The second second part of the presentation examines what it means for a man—Kanan Makiya—to collect and curate his life’s work, but also to collect archives, in other words: to collect collections. In specific we address an ethical contradiction: why was the Kanan Makiya Papers closed to protect his privacy when the Ba’th Party collections—which contain the names of thousands of living Iraqis and what had happened to them—remain open and available to scholars?

Musicians in twenty-first century Israel perform memories of erased and marginalized Mizrahi cultural pasts. In their processes of remembering and reconstructing family and communal narratives and musics, many find themselves visiting the National Sound Archive of the National Library of Israel, which contains thousands of hours of ethnographic recordings, recorded both pre-1948 in their ancestors’ countries of origin and in early statehood Israel. The encounters between the musicians and the recordings present multiple vectors of relationships, with the musical materials, with the people who were recorded, and with the people who made the recordings, all mediated by the institution of the National Library of Israel. In this paper, based on my ethnographic work with a number of third-generation musicians who refer to a range of Yemeni and North African art forms, I address questions that emerge from their encounters within the archive, about its history, its resonance in the present day, and of emergent ethical and political allegiances. First, I explicate the history of the National Sound Archive, illuminating its co-construction with the field of musicology in Israel, the multiple ideological motivations of Orientalism, Zionism, and comparative studies held in tension in their mutual unfolding over time, and the distinct positionalities of Mizrahim and Palestinians. I tease out the multiple critical and affective resonances of the present-day encounters within and performances of the archive, highlighting tensions between preservation and erasure, community and nation, audibility and silence, as well as cultural and social familiarity and distance. Through these tensions, I interrogate the specific role of sound, and ask about its libidinal and fugitive qualities in the context of simultaneous preservation and erasure. Finally, I address questions of ethics and allegiances to the various characters, histories, structures, and institutions, confronted both by me – as both ethnomusicologist and remembering subject myself – and by the musicians. I refer to post-colonial scholarship on the archive (e.g., Amit, 2014), discourse on fugitivity and sound (e.g., Sterne, 2003), and on performance and the archive (e.g., Hochberg, 2018). I argue that, for these musicians, the contemporary National Sound Archive in Israel constitutes an ambivalent space in which they enact their multiple and sometimes contradictory responses to Mizrahi preservation and erasure, in their various allegiances and disobediences to the state, to their own marginalized communities, to the field of ethnomusicology, and to the national archival institution.