Postgrowth Imaginaries

Postgrowth Imaginaries
Author: Luis I. Prádanos
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2018-11-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1786949369

Postgrowth Imaginaries brings together environmental cultural studies and postgrowth economics to examine radical cultural shifts sparked by the global financial crisis. The globalization of an economic culture addicted to constant growth destroys the ecological planetary systems while failing to fulfil its social promises. A transition toward what Prádanos calls ‘postgrowth imaginaries’—the counterhegemonic cultural sensibilities that are challenging the growth paradigm—is well underway in the Iberian Peninsula today.

Post-Growth Planning

Post-Growth Planning
Author: Federico Savini
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2022-05-18
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1000584046

This book draws on a wide range of conceptual and empirical materials to identify and examine planning and policy approaches that move beyond the imperative of perpetual economic growth. It sketches out a path towards planning theories and practices that can break the cyclical process of urban expansion, crises, and recovery that negatively affect ecosystems and human lives. To reduce the dramatic social and environmental impact of urbanization, this book offers both a critique of growth-led urban development and a prefiguration of ecologically regenerative and socially just ways of organizing cities and regions. It uncovers emerging possibilities for post-growth planning in the fields of collective housing, mobility, urban commoning, ecological land-use, urban–rural symbiosis, and alternative planning worldviews. It provides a toolkit of concepts and real-life examples for urban scholars, urbanists, activists, architects, and designers seeking to make cities prosper within planetary boundaries. This book speaks to both experts and beginners in post-growth thinking. It concludes with a manifesto and glossary of key terms for urban scholars, students, and practitioners.

Fables of Development: Capitalism and Social Imaginaries in Spain (1950-1967)

Fables of Development: Capitalism and Social Imaginaries in Spain (1950-1967)
Author: Ana Fernandez-Cebrian
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2023-05-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1802076417

Fables of Development: Capitalism and Social Imaginaries in Spain (1950-1967) focuses on a basic paradox: why is it that the so-called “Spanish economic miracle” —a purportedly secular, rational, and technocratic process— was fictionally portrayed through providential narratives in which supernatural and extraordinary elements were often involved? In order to answer this question, this book examines cultural fictions and social life at the time when Spain turned from autarchy to the project of industrial and tourist development. Beyond the narratives about progress, modernity, and consumer satisfaction on a global and national level, the cultural archives of the period offer intellectual findings about the expectations of a social majority who lived in the precariousness and who did not have sufficient income to acquire the consumer goods that were advertised. Through the scrutiny of interdisciplinary archives (literary texts, cinema, newsreels, comics, and journalistic sources, among other cultural artifacts), each chapter offers an analysis of the social imaginaries about the circulation and distribution of capital and resources in the period from 1950, when General Franco’s government began to integrate into international markets and institutions following its agreements with the United States, to 1967, when the implementation of the First Development Plan (1964-1967) was completed.

Post-Global Aesthetics

Post-Global Aesthetics
Author: Gesine Müller
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2022-10-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110762218

Phenomena such as the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, or the surge of political populism show that the current phase of accelerated globalization is over. New concepts are needed in order to respond to this exhaustion of the global project: the volume scrutinizes these responses in the aesthetic realm and under a "post-global" banner, while incorporating alternative, non-Western epistemologies and literatures of the post-colonial Global South.

Beyond Human

Beyond Human
Author: Maryanne L. Leone
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2023-10-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1487548338

Chronicling sixteenth-century Spain to the present day, Beyond Human aims to decentre the human and acknowledge the material historicity of more-than-human nature. The book explores key questions relating to ecological equity, justice, and responsibility within and beyond Spain in the Anthropocene. Examining relations between Iberian cultural practices, historical developments, and ecological processes, Maryanne L. Leone, Shanna Lino, and the contributors to this volume reveal the structures that uphold and dismantle the non-human–human dichotomy and nature-culture divide. The book critiques works from the Golden Age to the twenty-first century in a wide range of genres, including comedia, royal treatises, agricultural reports, paintings, satirical essays, horror fiction and film, young adult and speculative literature, poetry, graphic novels, and television series. The authors contend that Spanish cultural studies must expose the material historicity that entangles today’s ecological crises and ecosocial injustices with previous, future, and contemporary entities. The book argues that this will require the simultaneous decentring of the human and of the Anthropocene as an ecocritical framework. By standardizing ecosocial analysis and widening avenues for ecopedagogical approaches, Beyond Human participates in the ecocentric transformation of Hispanic cultural studies.

The Political Imagination in Spanish Graphic Narrative

The Political Imagination in Spanish Graphic Narrative
Author: Xavier Dapena
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2023-11-24
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1000999025

In a spirit of community and collective action, this volume offers insights into the complexity of the political imagination and its cultural scope within Spanish graphic narrative through the lens of global political and social movements. Developed during the critical years of the COVID-19 pandemic and global lockdown, the volume and its chapters reflect the interdisciplinary nature of the comic. They employ a cultural studies approach with different theoretical frameworks ranging from debates within comics studies, film and media theory, postcolonialism, feminism, economics, multimodality, aging, aesthetics, memory studies, food studies, and sound studies, among others. Scholars and students working in these areas will find the book to be an insightful and impactful resource.

A Companion to Spanish Environmental Cultural Studies

A Companion to Spanish Environmental Cultural Studies
Author: Luis I. Prádanos
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2023-01-17
Genre:
ISBN: 1855663694

An exploration of how writers, artists, and filmmakers expose the costs and contest the assumptions of the Capitalocene era that guides readers through the rapidly developing field of Spanish environmental cultural studies. From the scars left by Franco's dams and mines to the toxic waste dumped in Equatorial Guinea, from the cruelty of the modern pork industry to the ravages of mass tourism in the Balearic Islands, this book delves into the power relations, material practices and social imaginaries underpinning the global economic system to uncover its unaffordable human and non-human costs. Guiding the reader through the rapidly emerging field of Spanish environmental cultural studies, with chapters on such topics as extractivism, animal studies, food studies, ecofeminism, decoloniality, critical race studies, tourism, and waste studies, an international team of US and European scholars show how Spanish writers, artists, and filmmakers have illuminated and contested the growth-oriented and neo-colonialist assumptions of the current Capitalocene era. Focussed on Spain, the volume also provides models for exploring the socioecological implications of cultural manifestations in other parts of the world.

Work and Labor in World Languages, Literatures, and Film

Work and Labor in World Languages, Literatures, and Film
Author: Yves-Antoine Clemmen
Publisher: BrownWalker Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2021-05-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1599426218

The essays in this anthology represent a cross-section of current scholarship examining the complex interplay between work, in its broadest theoretical conceptualization, and the world cultures in and through which this labor is performed. Although aimed primarily at an academic audience, the included essays, written in English, Spanish, and French, are also accessible to the curious layperson interested in looking at literature, theater, cinema, and philosophy through the lens of world languages and cultures. For more than thirty years, the Southeast Conference for Languages, Literatures and Film (SCFLLF) has been a premier platform for the discussion and dissemination of the latest scholarship in the Humanities, with emphasis on non-English area studies. The current volume continues our tradition of selecting and showcasing some of the most impactful papers originally presented at the 24th SCFLLF, held in St. Petersburg, Florida, in March of 2020.

Feeling Strangely in Mid-Century Spanish and Latin American Women’s Fiction

Feeling Strangely in Mid-Century Spanish and Latin American Women’s Fiction
Author: Tess C. Rankin
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2023-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1835536409

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library as part of the Opening the Future project with COPIM. The early twentieth century was awash in revolutionary scientific discourse, and its uptake in the public imaginary through popular scientific writings touched every area of human experience, from politics and governance to social mores and culture. Feeling Strangely argues that these shifting scientific understandings and their integration into Hispanic and Lusophone society reshaped the experience of gender. The book analyzes gender as a felt experience and explores how that experience is shaped by popular scientific discourse by examining the “strange” femininity of young protagonists in four novels written by women in Spanish and Portuguese: Rosa Chacel’s Memorias de Leticia Valle (published in Argentina in 1945); Norah Lange’s Personas en la sala (Argentina, 1950); Carmen Laforet’s Nada (Spain, 1945); and Clarice Lispector’s Perto do coração selvagem (Brazil, 1943). It pairs each novel with a broad scientific theme selected from those that captured the contemporary popular imagination to argue that the young female protagonists in these novels all put forth visions of young womanhood as an experience of strangeness. Building on Carmen Martín Gaite’s term chicas raras, Rankin proposes this strangeness as constitutive of a gendered experience inextricable from affective and material engagements with the world.