Global Autofictional Flânerie Shaj Mathew (bio) I He is a walking paradox: a loner who desires the crowd, “a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito,” a spectator who casts off his air of detachment, a skeptic who can experience states of childlike wonder, “an ‘I’ with an insatiable appetite for the ‘non-I.’”1 More gaze than body, he is a phantom of the arcade, “a mirror as vast as the crowd itself . . . a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness” (Baudelaire, “Painter,” 9). Who is this person? “Observer, philosopher . . . —call him what you will,” the flâneur is the modern man par excellence, an urban stroller who will always be encountered, en passant, in the act of capturing “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent”—that is, the contradictory, enigmatic, and elusive condition otherwise known as modernity (13).2 This origin story has long dominated critical discussions of flânerie, a term I take to signify a way of moving through urban space as well as a first-person narrative form that documents that movement. The flâneur’s vein of solitary, melancholic, and aimless walking—typically coeval with the modernization of a global city—has become synonymous with strolls through nineteenth-century Paris. Even recent efforts to chart the spread of flânerie into other global cities have rehearsed this particular story, looking to Parisian flânerie as the initial tradition that contemporary walkers rail against or continue in.3 The rhyme between Paris, flânerie, and modernity has endured for many reasons, but it generally attests to the success of Charles [End Page 219] Baudelaire and his afterlife in the writings of Walter Benjamin. Rare is the treatment of streetwalking that does not acknowledge Baudelaire’s legendary typology of the flâneur in “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863).4 And if Baudelaire’s efforts were not enough, the association between the flâneur, France, and modernity was enshrined a century later, when Benjamin hailed Paris as “the promised land of the flâneur” in his unfinished yet exhaustive index of the city, The Arcades Project.5 This article aims to trouble these pairs. It constructs a wider genealogy of flânerie in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, beginning with two figures who sauntered through the streets of Tehran: the fokoli ( ) and the farangimaab ( ). By foregrounding the literal and fictional wanderings of these types, it locates the contemporary world flâneur—who forms the heart of this article—in a non-Western tradition; in doing so, it avoids contributing to a Eurocentric understanding of Paris as the capital of modernity, one that posits Baudelaire as the point of departure for all readings of the flâneur. These efforts to expand the canon of flânerie do not deny the richness of the writings of Baudelaire and Benjamin—only their singularity. Looking to the fokoli and farangimaab thus contributes to the theoretical project of “provincializing Europe” by identifying “actual forms of cosmopolitan life.”6 In the process, it restores flânerie to its untapped complexity, capaciousness, and global origins. Flânerie was a ubiquitous feature of urbanization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a practice of literal ambulation and narrative focalization that ultimately enabled a critique of modernization. If flânerie was a global phenomenon during this period, so too was modernity; this modernity was dialectical, the product of asymmetrical exchanges of ideas, fashions, and languages between cities “East” and “West.” In light of this composite view of modernity, the use of the word “flânerie” to describe a corpus that includes texts from the Global South may appear curious, even misguided. Why employ a “Western” term to treat “non-Western” objects, potentially ramifying problems of Eurochronology in the process?7 The first reason is legibility: the protagonist of urban life already has a name, and it is the flâneur. The use of the term also hinges on a second contention: just because flânerie was first coined in France does not mean it originated there. To believe so is to commit a genealogical fallacy. Thus, while fokolis or farangimaabs may have never used the term flânerie themselves, their lives and narrative representations exemplified...