Contingent Ruins in Leylâ Erbil's Remnant

In the text-based humanistic disciplines, ruins theory tends to treat ruins ( Ruinenlust , ruin porn, etc.) as the ideological domain of statist, imperialist, or capitalist systems—i.e., as an object to be critiqued and dismantled. This is in large part a result of the practice of Greco-Roman ruin-gazing in the Mediterranean, made fashionable and refined by the European ruling class and its Grand Tour through Italy, Greece, and the Near East. The present essay defamiliarizes and decolonizes so-called Greco-Roman ruins by turning away from that European genealogy toward a localized leftist perspective indigenous to the eastern Mediterranean itself. Through an excavational reading of Leylâ Erbil's Turkish-language novel Kalan (2011), I develop the concept of "contingent" ruins, built on the haptic etymology of the word: "a touching together," to explore the chance connections and coalitions that emerge from the ruins of state violence and the modern ethno-state.