City of Knowledge in Twentieth Century Iran: Shiraz, history and poetry by Setrag Manoukian (review)

Setrag Manoukian’s City of Knowledge is a genealogical ethnography of history and poetry in contemporary Iran that aims to explore the relationship between Iran’s history, poetry, and politics through a study of Shiraz, its ‘forms of knowledge’, the ‘techniques of power’ that operate at the intersection of the latter two, and the process of self-formation in relation to these two elements. The attentive reader will have noticed the Foucaltian resonances of this terminology and in fact the author makes clear his methodological stance from the very outset – Manoukian’s study is a journey through modern Shiraz’s knowledge practices undertaken though Foucault’s ‘disclocations’: savoirs, techniques of power, and subject formation.

The whole work is carried out with exceptional theoretical awareness and remarkable methodological consistency that is reflected in its overall structure. The book opens with an introduction that sets the basis for the whole reading by setting its methodological coordinates, explaining its main theoretical concerns, and outlining the structure of the book. City of Knowledge aims to analyse the relationship between sociality and knowledge in Iran by addressing those areas (‘dislocations’, in Manoukian’s wording, borrowed from Foucault) whereby Iranians’ understandings of their culture, history, and poetry are manifested more clearly. The introduction is followed by six chapters and a three-page conclusion.

In Chapter 1 the history of Shiraz as ‘the city of knowledge’ in the twentieth century is presented through an analysis of two works: Fursati Shirazi’s Asar-i ‘Ajam, and a comprehensive volume published in 1954 by the Kanun-i Danish-i Pars. The Asar, first published in 1896, is a ‘local history’ of the region that became a standard reference text in the twentieth century, while the publication by the Kanun is a collection of articles and translations by a group of Shirazi scholars aimed at summarising the constitutive elements of Shiraz as a city of knowledge with the intent to revamp the city’s once glorious past and re-launch it as an outstanding scholarly centre.

While Chapter 1 represents an extraordinary introduction to the subject of Shiraz as city of knowledge, Chapter 2 does not live up to the expectations set out. This chapter (‘Time, space and culture’) is predominantly theoretical and detached from the structure of the book, and its absence probably would not have been noticed. In it, Manoukian starts from the discussion of the dyad iskilit/sutun, taken, if I have duly understood the point, as symbolic yet contrasting elements of the material landscape of Shiraz. The iskilits are in fact the skeleton frames of steel columns and I-beams that, usually, due to lack of proper planning, rampant estate overdevelopment, and property speculation, stand lingering and unfinished for years in Iran as well as in any other country of the world where this problem exists. Sutuns are the columns that became fashionable in the architecture of the Pahlavi period, as an evocation of the ‘glories’ of pre-Islamic Iran, and that continue to be used in private building in Iran – in other words the Iranian counterparts of the capitalled columns used virtually everywhere in the world to conjure the air of a far and glorious past. A mark of bad planning and speculation the former, a display of tasteless affluence the latter – something universal and by no means specifically Iranian, let alone Shirazi. Moving from the dyad iskilit/sutun as exemplification of the regime of spatio-temporality of Shiraz (43), the author discusses the ‘reversal of the order of things’ that the Revolution brought about, touching upon architecture, toponymy, culture, and perception of time. The entire chapter does not add anything new to our knowledge and understanding of the Revolution, but rather comes across as a half-baked attempt to fit widely known facts into a theoretical framework in which iskilit...