Waste as a Necropolitical Tool in the Slum Ecology of Latife Tekin’s Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills

Latife Tekin’s Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills marks a pioneering intervention by bringing the peripheral slum settlements to the forefront of urban discourse. Establishing a distinctive subgenre of “shantytown fiction” situated in a milieu of garbage, the text reorients representations towards literary urban studies. This article examines Berji Kristin through the framework of Mike Davis’s “slum ecology” to uncover the mechanisms of “necropolitics” (Achille Mbembe) as the underpinning necropower structure. Engaging with waste critique to explore the symbolic ramifications of waste in perpetuating urban exclusion of informal settlers, and by employing Timothy Morton’s notion of “hyperobjects,” the study investigates the agential materiality of waste and its lethal entanglement with the precarious lives of the squatters in the novel. Through close reading, the article shows how waste operates as an amorphous entity of the social “Othering” by examining the intersection of occupation, location, and the socio-political accumulation of “waste.”