Introduction

Summary

This book brings together environmental cultural studies and postgrowth economics to examine counterhegemonic narratives and radical cultural shifts sparked by the global financial crisis of 2008. Furthermore, it presents a new cross-disciplinary framework for illuminating the rise of this counterhegemonic culture in Spain as well as its ecological, social, and political implications. The explanations of the crisis offered by mainstream media identify economic meltdown and lack of growth as the main causes and point to the recovery of growth as the desirable solution. Yet a number of critical voices worldwide have emphasized that in the context of a finite biosphere, constant economic growth is a biophysical impossibility and systemic social and ecological limits to growth can no longer be ignored. The problem is not a lack of growth but rather the globalization of an economic system addicted to constant growth, which destroys the ecological planetary systems that support life on Earth while failing to fulfill its social promises. According to these alternative accounts of the financial crisis, what we are really facing is a crisis of the legitimacy of the growth paradigm in general and its current neoliberal articulations in particular. The global economic crisis is thus better defined as an ongoing crisis of the growth imaginary.

Post-2008 Spain, where the crisis of growth seems to be the new normal, offers an ideal context to investigate these cultural processes, and this book demonstrates that a transition towards what I call ‘postgrowth imaginaries’—the counterhegemonic cultural sensibilities that are challenging the growth paradigm in manifold ways—is well underway in the Iberian Peninsula today. Specifically, this book explores how emerging cultural sensibilities in Spain—reflected in fiction and nonfiction writing and film, television programs, photographs and graphic novels, op-eds, web pages, political manifestos, and socioecological movements—are actively detaching themselves from the dominant imaginary of economic growth and, in some cases, even articulating counterhegemonic postgrowth narratives. Additionally, my research interrogates and redefines the role of cultural studies in understanding this shift towards postgrowth imaginaries, positing that these fundamental cultural changes can be better detected and understood in the light of concepts stemming from the rapidly emerging intellectual framework provided by the environmental humanities.