Chapter 2 - Urban Ecocriticism and Spanish Cultural Studies

Summary

How do we stop ourselves from fulfilling our fates as suicidally productive drones in a carbon-addicted hive, destroying ourselves in some kind of psychopathic colony collapse disorder?

—Roy Scranton

Spanish Urban Ecocriticism

In 1999, Michael Bennett and David W. Teague complained about ‘the historical gap between environmentalism, cultural studies, and the urban experience’. These urban cultural scholars had noticed that ecocriticism paid insufficient attention to the urban environment and that there was a need for an urban ecological cultural criticism. In response, they edited a volume of essays—The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban Environments—intended to ‘provide the parameters for an urban ecocriticism that offers the ecological component often missing from cultural analyses of the city and the urban perspective often lacking in environmental approaches to contemporary culture’. Although cultural critics’ interest in urban ecocriticism today is greater than ever before, it is still relatively scarce, and there is plenty of room for further scholarly explorations of the topic. In a recent book, Urban Ecologies, Christopher Schliephake rightly argues that

urban life, rather than constituting a solely human-dominated domain, is conditioned by the interaction with nonhuman life forms and agents— interactions that are themselves subject to public debate and cultural imagination. In other words, spatial-material processes constitute the framework of urban life, and it is on the cultural-discursive level that their inner workings and interrelations are reflected and imbued with meaning. It is in and through culture that urbanity emerges as an ecological system.

Schliephake finds that cultural urban ecology proves very fruitful for ‘the analysis of cultural representations of contemporary urbanity’.

Of course, these cultural urban ecocritical approaches are still extremely rare in Spanish cultural studies, where frameworks born of ecocriticism or urban studies were never fluid, let alone convergent. Spanish ecocriticism is only now emerging timidly. Nevertheless, the last decade has seen an impressive growth of scholarship in Iberian literary and cultural studies that places the city at the forefront of its cultural analysis, following the pioneering works of scholars such as Susan Larson, Malcolm Compitello, and Joan Ramon Resina. Special issues focusing on Hispanic cities and culture have mushroomed over the last decade in academic journals such as Letras Peninsulares, Colorado Review, Letras Femeninas, Ciberletras, and the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies.