Content area
Full Text
Yael Navaro-Yashin, The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), xxiv, 271 pp. ISBN 978-0-82235-204-4.
In The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity, anthropologist Yael Navaro-Yashin explores life in the self-declared, yet internationally unrecognized, Turkish Cypriot state in northern Cyprus. Since 1974, following ethnic violence and the division of the island, Turkish Cypriots have lived in the northern portion of the island. In 1982, they claimed northern Cyprus as a sovereign state, but only the Republic of Turkey has officially recognized it. Turkish Cypriots thus live in limbo between the undivided Cyprus of the past and the reconciled one of the future. In this volume, Navaro-Yashin portrays the affective experience of liminal citizens, showing how the past continues to haunt Turkish Cyprus and its inhabitants. She examines the ways in which the material products of the polity (maps, passports, barbed wire, official documents, monuments) and the material remains of the past conflict (destroyed homes, bullet holes, photographs, abandoned cars) create affective experience in northern Cyprus.
The author challenges our understanding of the affective experience of the material by exploring to what extent we can understand the environment as emitting an inherent affective energy beyond the meaning we impose upon it. She places her theoretical explorations between the social-constructionist position (humans are solely responsible for infusing the material/environment with meaning) and the object-centered position (that which lies outside of the subject/environment possesses the power to emanate meaning). As Navaro-Yashin puts it: "The concept of the make-believe that I introduce in this book challenges the opposition...