Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought
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Ragged Men on the Move: Poverty, Inertia and Friendship in Latife Tekin’s Swords of Ice (1989/tr.2007)
Get PDFLatife Tekin’s Swords of Ice (1989/tr.2007) depicts the lives of Halilhan and his best friend Gogi, “ragged men” from Istanbul’s “outer most belt” (18). Smart, spiritual, and naïve, Gogi tries to help Halilhan, although Halilhan tricks his brothers and misuses company funds to buy a second-hand red Volvo. While the Volvo is the techne for upward mobility, power and status, Halilhan recognizes that his well-tuned friendship with Gogi is vital to escape the poverty that their neighborhood imposes. This paper analyzes the friendship between Gogi and Halilhan, as they mark a fragile transgression of territorial boundaries, class norms, and socio-political values.
 
Spoiled Friendships and Perverted Foods in Yōko Ogawa’s The Diving Pool
Get PDFThis essay analyzes Yōko Ogawa’s The Diving Pool, in which the woman characters' ‘improper femininities’ are expressed through the rupturing of commensality. Ogawa's protagonists cause direct harm to those around them as a direct response to patriarchal norms of motherhood and child-rearing, as the novel explores how patriarchal capitalism and alienation destroy possibilities for female solidarity
Friend or Foe? Re-visioning Friendships Beyond Borders
Get PDFDestruction is transnational: homes, places of worship, healing and community are annihilated and the landscapes of counties are altered. Meanwhile, civilians are left to grapple with their new realities. However, the attention afforded to these disasters varies depending on factors of race, ethnicity, creed, and nationality—the ties that are held dear are the very bonds that determine friends from foes. In most cases, however, news of violence is met by indifference. Individuals are unable to empathize with strangers whose lives are being shattered. This paper analyzes Atiq Rahimi’s Earth and Ashes (1999/tr.2002) in order to argue that the vehicle transporting one away from apathy is a re-visioning of friendship. Questions of focus include, how is empathy formed for those who are long-gone, or for those whose faces one cannot see? And how can friendship help bridge this gap? An ethical turn to analyzing friendships that can forge connections around the world requires a “re-visioning” of what it means to be a witness to another’s distress as outlined by Oliver Kelly in Witnessing: Beyond Recognition and Michel Foucault’s “Friendship as a way of Life.”
In Earth and Ashes transit and re-visioning operate on two levels: physically across an unforgiving landscape to the coal mines, and emotionally through death and destruction to the eventual acceptance of infinite loss. This paper argues that progress down the road and past the checkpoint is enabled by fleeting relations working as vehicles: Dastaguir befriends a shopkeeper, a fellow bus passenger, and a servant who help facilitate his passage through the hazardous landscapes of war and trauma. As witnesses to Dastaguir’s transit, these friends help catalyse, and cauterise, exile from family, community, safety—from life itself until an ethical re-visioning of friendships beyond borders can occur
“A Meat Locker in Hebron”: Meat Eating, Occupation, and Cruelty in To the End of the Land
Get PDFIn this paper, I explore the connections between meat-eating, cruelty, and the Israeli/Palestinian crisis in Israeli author David Grossman's 2008 novel To the End of the Land (translated from the Hebrew in 2010 by Jessica Cohen). Using the radical vegetarian-feminist theories of Carol J. Adams, I argue that in the novel, Grossman reveals how the Israeli nation-state's treatment of the occupied Palestinian people is part and parcel of the same ideological construct that allows its citizens to consume the flesh of dead animals; if a nation can eat meat, it can dehumanize and oppress its unwanted others. In particular, I look at a pivotal moment in the novel, where the protagonist Ora's son's military unit leaves an elderly Palestinian man chained up and suffering in a Hebron meat locker; I locate this event as the most important physical space in a novel preoccupied with space, land, and physicality. I also look at another example of a Jewish author grappling with the cruelty of eating meat, the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer's short story "The Slaughterer." Finally, I interrogate the idea, put forward by Todd Hasak-Lowy, that Grossman is less concerned with the sufferings of the Palestinian people than he is the sufferings of the stoic Israeli, forced to make compromising moral choices
The Poetics of Settler Fatalism: Responses to Ecocide from within the Anthropocene
Get PDFIt is impossible to think today, without thinking of the Anthropocene. As biospheres are pushed ever-closer towards exhaustion, collapse, and/or radically inhospitable transmutations, there is a simultaneous explosion of work striving to represent and understand this epoch. However, the Anthropocene should not be thought in isolation from other social, political, and ecological processes. In this paper, I investigate the Anthropocene’s intersection with settler colonialism. Of particular interest to this paper are the metaphorical and narrative accounts about wastelanded spaces; that is, how meaning is ascribed to the local manifests of the Anthropocene as they are birthed on colonized territories. I ask what sort of futurities or recuperations are imagined as extant within the Anthropocene; in particular, whether possibilities for anti-colonial futures are imagined as existing within or emerging from wastelanded spaces. I investigate Richard-Yves Sitoski’s (settler) brownfields. In this intensely located book of poetry—which Sitoski describes as a “poetic ‘autogeography” of Owen Sound”—identifying the presence of what I call settler fatalism in the face of the Anthropocene and its attendant brownfields. I suggest this fatalism is brought about by a melancholic attachment to the processes of wastelanding that are endemic to settler colonization. The final section of this paper contrasts the settler fatalism of Sitoski with the still ambivalent, though more generative poetry of Liz Howard (Ashinaabek). I suggest that Howard’s Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent approaches the Anthropocene not as a terminal epoch, but as what Donna Haraway calls “a boundary event”
What Can Play: The Potential of Non-Human Players
Get PDFWhat can post-humanism teach us about game design? This paper questions the line drawn between what species and matter can play and what cannot play. Combining works by scholars of feminist post-humanism, new materialism, and game studies, primarily Jane Bennett, Donna Haraway, and T.L. Taylor, it proposes that play is a form of communication not only between animals and humans but also between plants and cyborgs, insects and atoms. Beginning by interrogating the borders of the human that have been built on ableist and racist discourses, this paper moves towards considering the human as interspecies and outlines that we must reassess the ways in which a multiplicity of species experience the intra-action that constitutes “play.” With a brief look into the history of defining play in both game studies and animal studies and their small crossover, play is reconfigured into an outlook or an approach rather than a set of rules. It is a drive that all species and matter experience, including insects, bacteria, and metal. This moves us beyond considering solely the materiality of our bodies at play by reconsidering the objects of play as our co-players, as matter with agential force. I argue that we need to reconsider the videogame player as an interspecies being, an assemblage of human and non-human bodies. The de-anthropocentricization of the popular notions of player agency allows for a multiplicity of reactions not created in the linear cause and effect course, the belief in ultimate player control within procedural systems, which dominates game studies. This paper concludes by submitting possibilities of what considering the non-human through a feminist and anti-ableist lens can offer game designers, players, and critics, such as considering the material platform’s impact on play, reforming the individualistic agency of players, and designing for the Other(s)