Cultural hegemony is being contested and challenged in post-2008 Spain by a significant number of cultural manifestations. Postgrowth Imaginaries has explored how many of these emerging cultural sensibilities in Spain are actively detaching themselves from the dominant imaginary of economic growth. The first part of the book, ‘Spanish Culture and Postgrowth Economics’, combines cultural studies and postgrowth economics to articulate a degrowth-inspired Iberian ecocriticism able to expose the contradictions of mainstream Euro-American environmentalism. This ecocritical approach reveals that the main obstacles to articulating a political ecology able to deal effectively with the most pressing social and ecological issues arise not only from right-wing denialism but also, and more disturbingly, from progressive techno-optimism. The second part, ‘Urban Ecologies’, invites scholars of urban culture to think of modern cities in terms of socionatural metabolisms embedded in unsustainable energy regimes and growth imaginaries. Such a framework enables a critical review of cultural representations of urbanity as well as an assessment of their effectiveness in challenging the dominant imaginary. The last part of the book, ‘Waste, Disaster, Refugees, and Nonhuman Agency’, advocates considering the socioecological significance of nonhuman agency and embracing a political ecology of waste to productively disrupt the dominant imaginary. I also urged cultural activists and scholars to move from a reactive fear-infused pedagogy of catastrophe to a more empowering, playful, and proactive pedagogy of degrowth. Moving into the future, the combination of a decolonial ecocriticism and a critical politics of hope may be able to overcome mainstream apolitical techno-optimism. For a critique of the growth imaginary is necessary but not sufficient; imagining and enacting desirable postgrowth societies is also vital.

This book demonstrates that a postgrowth imaginary is emerging on the Iberian Peninsula today and offers several ways of reading its cultural implications from a degrowth-inspired environmental humanities perspective. The complex interrelations among cultural practices, economic paradigms, and ecological processes are vastly under-theorized. I have tried my best in this book to provide an innovative and functional frame, articulated around the notion of postgrowth imaginaries, that can illuminate these important connections.