Paper short abstract

Iranian youth of the 1980s, remember and performatively enact, mobilise, and embody cultural forms that reconstruct the collective memories of their generation; I focus here on the materiality of these memories, by providing a sensory reading if the much circulated memorabilia of the 1980s.

Paper long abstract

Iranian youth, particularly the children of 1980s, continue to remember and performatively enact, mobilise, and embody cultural forms that reconstruct the collective memories of their generation; such cultural practices quietly inscribe past experiences (such as those of wartime) in their perceptions of, and interactions with, the self and the world around them. I focus here on the materiality of these memories, by providing a sensory reading if the much circulated memorabilia of the 1980s. Asking questions about the persistence and repetitions of such memory-work and performativity through objects, I examine the underlying individual desires as well as shared meanings that compel this generation to return to the 1980s; they recall and reconstruct this era as a time of, on the one hand, sociopolitical anomie, double binds, and internalized anxieties, and on the other, of utopian dreams, solidarity, and lost hopes that shaped their childhood. I focus on objects, sounds, and images that serve to historicise and witness to historical ruptures long overlooked while also evoking a sense of uncanny and simultaneous nostalgia and anxiety. These cultural productions, online and offline, serve as affective sites for the reconstruction of and working through childhood memories of social ruptures. I use 'rupture' as an alternative conceptual framework for understanding these generationally negotiated, diffused, and politically configured iterations of memory. Clinical renditions of trauma too, however, have become a cultural resource for young Iranians; they serve to resocialize and re-politicise the otherwise medicalised and de-politicised discourse of post-war trauma.