Ends of Language in the Anthropocene: Narrating Environmental Destruction in Turkish, Arabic, and Arab-Anglophone Speculative Fiction
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Tabur, Merve
- Graduate Program:
- Comparative Literature
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- February 23, 2021
- Committee Members:
- Nergis Erturk, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Nergis Erturk, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Shuang Shen, Committee Member
Anna Ziajka Stanton, Committee Member
Claire Mary Colebrook, Outside Member
Sabine Doran, Outside Member
Charlotte Diane Eubanks, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- Turkish literature
Arabic literature
Arab-Anglophone literature
Speculative fiction
Middle East
Anthropocene
Environmental justice
Environmental destruction
Climate Change - Abstract:
- This dissertation examines the development of an environmentally conscious and planetary aesthetics in contemporary speculative fiction from the Middle East and its Anglophone diasporas. I analyze Turkish, Arabic, and Arab-Anglophone texts that focus on environmental justice concerns in the Iraqi, Turkish, and Egyptian contexts. I investigate the burgeoning planetary-ecocritical aesthetics as a new development in Middle Eastern speculative fiction which is responding to the increasing urgency of ecological issues such as climate change and the associated national, regional, and global risks at stake. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach informed by the methodologies of postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, and feminist theory, I turn to theories of the Anthropocene—a contested term that identifies humanity as the primary agent of ecological change in the current geological epoch. I investigate how contemporary authors from the Middle East and its diasporas contribute to and challenge universalist conceptualizations of the Anthropocene that center around liberal conceptions of human subjectivity. I argue that the texts under study critique universalist environmentalist discourses that can further reinforce neocolonial agendas through greenwashing and development projects. In bringing Turkish, Arabic, and Arab-Anglophone texts together, I devise a new framework of comparison that articulates global ecological issues in their local specificity and complexity. This study underlines the significance of envisioning the life futures of the planet from a multi-lingual perspective that deconstructs the mainstream discourses and narrative forms we use in thinking about the Earth. Such recalibration of global ecological issues through multi-scalar, historicized, and linguistically diverse analyses through an emphasis on Middle Eastern ecologies expands the uses of the Anthropocene beyond its scientific applications to historically-informed discussions on environmental justice and language politics.