Literary Representations of Human-Nonhuman Labour Collaborations
abstract
he Anthropocene refers to a geological time interval triggered by the human activities on Earth, and proposes humans as geological forces changing the ecosystems irreversibly. However, human activities, such as industrialization, overpopulation, extreme consumption habits, and exploitation of natural resources put pressure on our planet’s sustainability. Thus, these human induced stressors on the environment pose a threat for all biological species inhabiting the Earth, both human and nonhuman. Industrialization is one of the suggested starting points of the Anthropocene epoch. Taking industrialisation, which started to accelerate in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the transition from wood to fossil fuels like coal to meet the need for energy during the industrialization process as its primary focus, this article explores how the efforts of industrialisation effect socio-cultural life and the relations of human and nonhuman agents nearby. Portraying the entangled lives of the coal miners and their nonhuman helpers, miner mules, in a newly developing mining town in the 19th century Turkey, Zonguldak, this study opens to discussion or consideration various issues related to the working class environmentalism and the nonhuman labour. For illustrative purposes, various literary texts written in this period, such as Turkish novelist Mehmet Şeyda’s Yanartaş [The Burning Stone] and poems by Turkish poet like Orhan Veli Kanık and Rıfat Ilgaz, will be referred.