Latife Tekin's urban ecologies

pp. 201-231

in: Meliz Ergin, The ecopoetics of entanglement in contemporary Turkish and American literatures, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

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.