Taking this striking analogy as a starting point, this panel problematizes the anthropocentric focus of hospitality and how it impacts displaced communities. We propose to ask, following Jacques Derrida, “what happens to the fraternity of brothers when an animal enters the scene.” By looking at literary and cinematographic representations of the figure of the migrant in a series of twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels, films, and theoretical texts, we will explore how national, geographic, and cultural boundaries might evolve with a hospitality that transcends species. What would ownership of territory look like if non-human components were granted agency? How do we envision a non-anthropocentric cosmopolitanism? How would we redefine national identities in this new vision of hospitality?
Hande Gurses’ paper, “Barking Stories: Testimony and Belonging in Haw,” focuses on Kemal Varol’s 2014 novel Haw, an account of the unofficial war in eastern Turkey during the 1990s, as recounted by a dog. The anthropomorphized language of the dog narrator problematizes the unofficial ban on the Kurdish language in Turkey, which was only alleviated in 2013 with the authorization of the use of Kurdish letters q, w, and x. The title of the novel is created via the onomatopoeic word used for the sound of barking dog in Turkish—“hav”—spelled with a “w,” a letter of the Kurdish alphabet. For Gurses, “haw,” a non-word that exists on the peripheries of these two languages, problematizes the definitions of national, linguistic, and ethnic identities. What is the relation between language and belonging? How does one translate from a forbidden language? What possibilities of resistance does inter-species translation hold? By engaging with the construction of national identities through the lens of critical animal studies, Gurses’ paper offers a timely insight into the current political tensions in Turkey, analyzing the role of the animal and its reflection on Kurdish identity and language as well as its operation in relation to the dominance of Turkish identity.
Efe Khayyat’s paper, “Isle of Dogs,” focuses upon the deportation of Istanbul’s stray dogs in 1910, a decision made under European guidance and meant to address the hygienic requirements of a modernizing city. Sent to a small island off the coast, the animals starved to death. Starting from this moment of deportation and exile and taking its lead from Jacques Derrida’s The Animal that Therefore I Am, Khayyat’s paper discusses two accounts of the dog massacre: Catherine Pinguet’s novel Les Chiens d’Istanbul (2008) and Serge Avedikian’s award-winning animated short film The Barking Island (“Chienne d’histoire,” 2010), and interprets them alongside Wes Anderson’s 2018 film Isle of Dogs, which was inspired by Avedikian’s film. The paper also addresses the perspectives of several historical and literary witnesses to the massacre and critics of the policy, including Kurdish philosopher and Young Turk Abdullah Cevdet, caricaturist SEM, Mark Twain, and Sir Mark Sykes.
Penny Vlagopoulos’ paper, “Toward a Posthuman Cosmopolitanism: Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo or Puro Cuento,” argues that narratives that are posthuman in ways that are not explicitly representational can allow us to deconstruct what it means to be human by having us consciously recognize already existent posthuman configurations of subjectivity. What can posthumanism mean in narratological terms? She explores these questions through Chicana author Sandra Cisneros’s 2002 novel Caramelo or Puro Cuento. A global saga that traces the Reyes family through centuries of migration, Caramelo uses interwoven narratives by women that redress fragmentations caused by dislocation. She argues that the text uses the device of ghosting—the “Awful grandmother” speaks from the dead and tells her story—along with other discursive strategies to delineate a posthuman cosmopolitanism that restructures the notion of place—in the micropolitics of local, anticapitalist struggles—and promotes broad alliances suggested by Homi Bhabha’s notion of “global minoritarian culture.” Generating shifts in reader consciousness, the novel increases our awareness of already being posthuman, and challenges our understanding of geographic and cultural boundaries. Ultimately, Vlagopoulos argues, the text’s vision of posthumanist cosmopolitanism moves beyond discursive terrains of struggle to the politics of everyday life in a bordered world.
In keeping with the framing of the panel, Hana Worthen’s paper, “Performing Canine Hospitality in Aki Kaurismäki’s Films,” starts from a moment in Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism: describing a “world of conditioned reflexes” in which people are trained, like “Pavlov’s dog,” “to eat not when...hungry but when a bell rang,” man is a “perverted animal,” according to Arendt. Having no place within and without polities, “refugees or Displaced Persons” have only an animal-species identity; they take on an identity shared with the animals, for whom the right to have the right to life is not suspended, but who nonetheless fall out of the wider right to have rights, accentuated along the lines of “humanity.” The anthropocentric automatism Arendt’s thought retains is challenged by the performances of two dogs in Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki’s films Le Havre (2011) and On the Other Side of Hope (2017), in which Laika and Koistinen, like their human counterparts, enact a consequential solidarity with the displaced persons at the center of the narrative. Paired with illegal refugees, the nonhuman animals become, in Arendt’s words, “cobuilders of a common world,” rendering a new vision of “organized community” free from the privileging of humanity. Considering Laika’s and Koistinen’s performances as sites of cosmopolitan hospitality, of interspecies relationality, Worthen analyzes the ways they speak back to Arendt’s “humanity,” emphatically recasting subaltern humanity, trans-species interconnectivity, and a politics of animality.