KIM FORTUNY Islam, Westernization, and Posthumanist Place: The Case of the Istanbul Street Dog In one narrow street (but none of them are wide) I saw three dogs lying coiled up, about a foot or two apart. End to end they lay, and so they just bridged the street neatly, gutter to gutter. A drove of a hundred sheep came along. They stepped right over the dogs, the rear crowding the front, impatient to get on. The dogs looked lazily up, flinched a little when the impatient feet of the sheep touched their raw backs—sighed, and lay peace- fully down again. No talk could be plainer than that. –Mark Twain in Istanbul, The Innocents Abroad 266 “That one there . . .” [points to a street dog off-screen] “she's a Sufi. She eats her food but hides her rice; I think she's feeding a rabbit or a hedgehog. She's a mystery. She has a secret.”–Serdar, Taşkafa: Stories of the Street) 1 I. An Animal on the Edge of Description 2 Defending the “radical, plural otherness” of animals, Paul Shepard in the early pages of The Others: How Animals Made us Human suggests that animals, and especially marginal animals, resist our cognitive efforts to define them: “Categories defined by human observers inevi- tably collide with animals at the edges of categories.... In this way Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21.2 (Spring 2014) Advance Access publication May 6, 2014 doi:10.1093/isle/isu049 © The Author(s) 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isle/article-abstract/21/2/271/725197 by guest on 21 May 2020