A colour photograph displays a bright red Coca-Cola advertisement reminiscent of 1960s American middle class consumption. The photograph, however, was taken in southwest Iran, in the city of Abadan, merely a few decades after the establishment of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and the construction of the first oil refinery in the Middle East. In the span of a few short decades, Abadan became the symbol of modernity conjured by oil wealth and the icon of Iranian anti-colonial struggle against British imperialism in the movement for nationalization of oil. This paper analyzes the temporal tensions in iconic representations of Abadan before and after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Based on analysis of visual and literary material of Abadan’s contemporary built and natural environment, I argue that Abadan is characterized by a paradoxical temporality--defined at once as a city in decline and a symbol of progress. As the site of the operation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (and later, the National Iranian Oil Company), Abadan was spatialized and memorialized in the national imaginary through photographs, films, novels, and newspapers in pre-Revolutionary Iran. After the 1979 Revolution, the physical remnants of the Iran-Iraq War and subsequent environmental catastrophes have become sedimented in both Abadan’s urban infrastructures and its representations. Additionally, the recent designation of Abadan as part of Iran’s free trade zones has enabled new potentialities and a different promise of modernity and prosperity promoted by the Islamic Republic. This paper argues that, set against the backdrop of urban and environmental decline, the iconic image of Abadan produces a disjunctive temporality in which modernity did not fulfill its historical promise--namely progress. The material spatialization of Abadan, its visual and literary representation, along with the availability and flow of commodities constitute a dominant discourse of “derailed modernity” that has become symbolic of Iran’s contemporary moment. This provincial perspective from southwest Iran brings into focus broader debates in present-day Iran centering around contested notions of progress, modernity, history, sovereignty and Iran’s place within a globalized economy.

Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and economic hub, has been touted as ‘the most dangerous megacity in the world’. Rampant urban violence, ethnic strife and the outbreak of terror activities post-9/11 have created insecurity and instability in the city, which some scholars argue has paved the way for migrations to the Gulf coast, as well as Europe, in search of economic and social security. These out-migrations, however, are not just a result of current violence and instability. They stem from a longer history that dates back to Karachi’s infrastructural development as a port city -- the labour used in the construction of the harbor were migrants from the Iranian side of the Makran coast and Oman. This paper shows that this historical mobility and movement of people opens the port city into an oceanic frontier, unhinging territorial fixities and creating renewed regional formations. Examining visual, scholarly and literary material on Karachi, I argue that the city deterritorializes itself from a South Asian frontier through ongoing labour migrations as well as movement of objects, images and ideas across the Persian Gulf. It loosens ties of cultural rootedness in various forms, such as nostalgia for an unrealized Western modernity vis-a-vis Karachi’s colonial past, and current movements of people towards the Middle East in search of economic security. To borrow from Kamran Asdar Ali, the efficacy of the category of the city lies within its urban spatiality, whereby gendered, raced and classed subjects negotiate the terms of belonging while being the objects of urban projects. I argue, however, that this efficacy also creates an excess, whereby the material infrastructure and historical particularity of Karachi as a port city allows it to remain in an ongoing territorial flux, and thus evade geographical fixities and recalibrate regional boundaries.

While a wealth of excellent scholarship has charted the dynamics of memory in Beirut, this paper argues that train ruins, as both a site and subject of research, offer a compelling vantage point from which to explore alternative narrations of Lebanon’s past. This paper takes as its starting point Nothing to Declare, a book of ethnographic train narratives compiled by the Dictaphone Group, a Lebanese research and performance collective. While the stated aim of the Dictaphone Group’s project, among others, is “to question our relationship to the city, and redefine its public space,” I will locate their work within a wider set of intellectual, activist, and artistic projects focused on ruins, narratives, and memory, exploring what is politically at stake in such projects at this particular historical moment. I argue that the book’s empirical focus on narratives from three cities on the margins of Lebanon’s urban historiography - Riyaq, Tripoli, and Saida - poses a subtle challenge to a Beirut-centric understanding of the politics of memory. Further, I argue that the book’s focus on ruins of train stations themselves -- as polysemous icons of Lebanon’s pre-war past, the contested legacy of Ottoman and French influence in the region, cross-border connection to Syria and Palestine, contested class and property relations, wars and military occupations, and a site from which ideals of the state are projected -- uniquely brings into view some of the most important dynamics of struggle, contradiction, and connection within Lebanese society today. I conclude with reflections on the ways Nothing to Declare might call into question the forward-looking futurity implied by the promise of Syria’s “post-war” reconstruction, and, in turn, the very notion of time after war. In this way, Lebanon’s train ruins reflect Christopher Pinney’s challenge to think about infrastructural objects not merely as a surface for the projection of needs and interests, but as active agents in political processes which are disjunctive, excessive, and often unrevealing of their expected cultural or historical context.

A multi-ethnic, Muslim majority city which is home to Turkish, Pomak, Roma and Bulgarian Orthodox populations of Southern Bulgaria, Kardzhali has been an industrial and mining hub during the communist era. The deindustrialization of the region after the collapse of communism in 1989, together with the entry of Bulgaria into the European Union (EU) in 2007 recast the inhabitants of Kardzhali as the cyclical labor migrants working in Western European industries. This paper focuses on the shifting transportation infrastructure of Kardzhali and the different types of labor mobilities they engender in order to understand their role in the region formation processes of two transnational projects, namely Eastern Bloc communism and the European Union. Through a comparison between the communist era road construction projects which connected the workers of communism to their mining areas and factories, and the EU built “Pan-European Corridors” which are not only the symbols of Bulgaria’s Europeanization but also the material networks between Kardzhali residents and their working sites in Western Europe, this paper reflects on the changing mobility regimes of these transnational projects. By centralizing the precarities of the cyclical migratory workers of Kardzhali, it problematizes the idealized freedom of mobility discourse which is at the heart of the European project. Moreover, throughout the paper, region making is regarded as a contested realm in which competing interests and expectations of multiple parties enter into negotiation. In this sense, the paper also considers Turkish government’s religious and political interventions on this Muslim majority region as another aspect of the current region formation processes.