The politics of street names: Reconstructing Iran’s collective identity

Abstract

With the radical political change in 1979, Iran's revolutionary state assumed the responsibility of re‐rewriting the past history to forge a new sense of belonging, a particularly collective religious (Shia) identity. It launched a complex process of forgetting and remembering to first eliminate the national (Persian), non‐religious memories and heritage, associated and celebrated by the previous regime and then establish a sense of continuity with the country's Shia past; a feeling markedly engendered with a distinguishing symbolic reservoir of Shia traditions and memories, presented in history books, literature, the media, and everyday culture.This paper seeks to examine the role of street names in this process of reconstructing a new religious (Shia) collective memory and identity with particular reference to Tehran, Iran, during the 1979‐2019 period. It seeks to analyze changes in the city's street names and analyze the widespread renaming of streets and public spaces in the city as one means of both ‘de‐commemorating’ the pre‐revolutionary regime and marking the Shia legacy and memories as the signifiers of a widespread political maneuver to articulate a new version of the past and narrative of identity since the 1979 revolution.