ABSTRACT
In Alain Mabanckou’s 2015 novel Black Moses, the titular character loses his home which also causes him to lose the use of adverbials. This is read as a total upending of a subject rather than just attacking something piece-by-piece. Because this event was triggered by the loss of home, the home is taken as the final sham ruin under consideration. Yet rather than seeing the home as an object that can become a ruin, it is seen as a ruin from the start. The destruction of homes in films by Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Haneke, and Jean-Marc Vallée are used to support this statement. Then, a theory of turning objects into sham ruins, or ‘punking’ objects, is considered along with China Miéville’s novel Perdido Street Station (2000) and Miguel Llansó’s film Crumbs (2015). The main theory for this chapter centers around Evan Calder Williams’ idea of ‘hostile objects,’ which is then used to read Ivan Vladislavi?’s novel The Folly (1993), which was the original inspiration for the whole sham ruins project.
