Non-human agency and ecological collapse in Yaşar Kemal's Akçasaz’ın Ağaları series

This article examines non-human agency and ecological collapse in the Akçasaz’ın Ağaları series by Yaşar Kemal (1926–2015), comprising Demirciler Çarşısı Cinayeti (1974) and Yusufçuk Yusuf (1975). Set in Çukurova during the transition from feudal landholding to capitalist agriculture, the novels connect swamp drainage, mechanization, forced resettlement, cotton cultivation, and Armenian property confiscation to transformations of land, labor, and social life. Atmospheric forces, species life, machinery, and the Akçasaz swamp shape perception, movement, conflict, and historical outcomes. Tracing non-human agency across bodily, ecological, and institutional scales, the article shows how non-human processes exceed human intentions and redirect collective action. Drawing on slow violence, distributive agency, actants, atmospheric agency, and metabolic rift, it treats property relations and biophysical change as dimensions of a historical process. The swamp becomes the analytic site where ecological degradation, disease, refuge, property struggles, and dispossession converge, binding ecological processes, social relations, and memory within an entangled catastrophe.