Abstract
This chapter examines the interlaced environmental-political issues in Latife Tekin’s Rüyalar ve Uyanışlar Defteri and Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills. Ergin first explores the continuum between urbanization, ecological decay, and ecopolitical resistance in Rüyalar. She then turns to Berji Kristin to demonstrate that Tekin uses waste as an entry point to inquire into the tangle of material and socio-political forces that constantly change the terrain we inhabit. Ergin focuses on waste cultures in marginal settlements and the materiality of waste, respectively, to investigate the movement between the environmental and the socio-political. She argues that both Spahr and Tekin open posthuman subjectivity to affective connections with (non)human otherness without compromising the possibility of political agency and responsibility.
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Notes
- 1.
To give an example, Atatürk Cultural Center (AKM), which was founded in 1969 and named after Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, was shut down for restoration in 2008 and never reopened.
- 2.
Located on the European coastline of the Bosphorus strait, the Dolmabahçe Palace served as the main administrative center of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After the foundation of the Turkish Republic, all government functions were transferred to Ankara, but the Palace remained in use as a presidential residence until it became a museum-palace in 1984.
- 3.
Lying fifteen kilometers northwest of Istanbul , the forest was named after the thousands of Serbs who were deported from Belgrade in 1521 when it fell to the Ottomans and who were brought back to live in the area surrounding the forest. A region of approximately 5500 hectares of forest, Belgrad houses various plant, bird, and animal species as well as historical reservoirs.
- 4.
A settlement in the Fatih district of Istanbul , historically occupied by Romani communities that have been displaced from the quarter due to gentrification projects driven by the private sector and governmental agencies.
- 5.
An Istanbul quarter that was considered an urban outskirt in the 1980s, when it was expanding to be an industrial site occupied by factories and make-shift dwellings.
- 6.
A contemporary manifestation of the importance attributed to garbage can be found in Metareciclagem, a Brazilian grassroots project originated in 1992 for reclaiming high-tech detritus known as e-waste for social, communitarian, and aesthetic purposes. Rooted in Brazilian traditions of social constructivism, Metareciclagem is defined as a decentralized and autonomous project that involves local communities in the entire process, making them both protagonists and beneficiaries of technological appropriation. See Margaret Anne Clarke’s “Digital Brazil: Open-Source Nation and the Meta-Recycling of Knowledge” in The Noughties in the Hispanic and Lusophone World (2012).
- 7.
Whereas Berji is the name used to praise young shepherd girls in the village (and girls picking over refuse in Flower Hill), Kristin is the name that local boys give to Crazy Gönül, a sex worker in the neighborhood.
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Ergin, M. (2017). Latife Tekin’s Urban Ecologies. In: The Ecopoetics of Entanglement in Contemporary Turkish and American Literatures. Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63263-6_7
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