• Many Places in One

    Many Places in One

    Explore the city as an intrinsically heterogeneous network of human and nonhuman elements and actors

The city of Tbilisi, current capital of the country of Georgia, has experienced a turbulent series of changes since the dawn of the modern period. Among these transformations have been the destruction of the essentially Persianate (Safavid-Qajar) city by Qajar Iran in 1795, its reconstruction and repopulation in the wake of the Russian annexation of Georgia in 1801, its elevation to the status of colonial capital and most populous city of the entire Caucasus region under Russian rule (1801-1917), its role as capital of independent Georgia during a brief period of independence (1918-1921), and finally becoming the capital of Georgia in the socialist (1921-1991) and postsocialist (1991-2014) periods. For much of this history, Tbilisi was a multiethnic and polyglot city: its transformation from a cosmopolitan to a specifically Georgian city is largely an outcome of the postwar era. Drawing both on Georgian and comparative urban literatures, this project seeks to understand the city as a historically layered object, in which the ethnographic present cannot be understood without reference to the haunting of these varied pasts. Each city is at the same time a single space with "multiple orderings, encounters, cores and planes; it is many places in one" (Lai 2007: 207). Cities are therefore intrinsically “multiple objects”, inviting multiple readings. In order to address the temporal and material heterogeneity of the city, this grant will treat Tbilisi (as well as more peripherally other Georgian cities, such as Batumi and "Lazika") as an "urban assemblage", composed of heterogeneous networks of human and non-human actors: people, pets, plants; quotidian and artistic practices, literatures, media; infrastructures and architectures. We seek to understand five "imagined cities" (Low 1996) which are assembled out of, and juxtaposed in, the temporally and spatially heterogeneous fabric of Tbilisi:

 

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The City of Gardens (1735-1850)
The 17th-18th century Safavid-Qajar Persian poetry of gardens combines with images of the actual gardens of Tbilisi in 19th-century literature to produce an "Oriental" city in literature from the Russian period centered thematically on feasting in gardens.
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Old Tbilisi (1850-1917)
The nostalgic image of “Old Tbilisi” captures the divided colonial city under Russian colonial rule where a set of "Oriental" spaces that could handily be opposed to the emergent "European" spaces of the divided colonial city, even as genres of poetry and practice that circulate in these spaces become "Oriental" or "European" by association.
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Modernist Tbilisi (1917-1924)
The period after Russian rule and before Georgia’s forced re-entry into the Soviet Union is an unusually vibrant interregnum in which Tbilisi briefly became a global centre for Modernism. In Georgian Modernism, both a literary movement and a technological process of modernization, material infrastructures like cafes, streetcars, electric lights, indexes of modernization, are assembled together with futurist manifestos to produce a modernist Bohemia; Most of the material for this period is hosted at our sister website Modernism.Ge.
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Socialist Tbilisi (1925-1991)
The focus of this section begins with Tbilisi after Stalin, beginning in the period of the 1960s, when Tbilisi increased rapidly in size, which marks the beginning of a new narrative of Tbilisi. Along with new infrastructures like the Metro and Cable-Car networks, the socialist city involved production of "cultured" citizens and "cultured" spaces such as cafes, boulevards, parks, gardens, part of a socialist version of a "European" narrative of civilizing process.
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Post-socialist Tbilisi (1991-Present)
The collapse of socialism leads to a the chaotic "wilderness city" which haunts recent memory, a city where electrical infrastructures stopped functioning, feral erstwhile household pets roaming in packs and armed men become the diagnostic signs of public spaces. At the same time, the ruins of the old city inspire fantasies of gleaming "future cities" modeled on Singapore, either built on the ruins of the old or entirely new cities.