Cultural Responses to the Spanish Neoliberal Crisis and the Global Ecocritical Turn

On May 15, 2011, a number of protesters assembled improvised camps in symbolic central public spaces in many Spanish cities. This was the beginning of the 15-M (also known as the indignados), a massive, decentralized, and nonhierarchical social movement that responded not only to the implementation of socially devastating austerity measures after the global financial crisis, but to several decades of top-down financial and political neoliberalization that has privatized the benefits of economic growth in a few hands and socialized its associated downsides to everyone else. In Spain, the severity of the global financial crisis and the increase in public debt were aggravated by the real estate bubble that had spurred the rapid economic growth of the previous decade. During the decade prior to the crisis, public and private debt was encouraged by all Spanish administrations in the name of growth. After the crisis, the Spanish economy found itself borrowing more to ‘rescue the banks’ and to pay interest on the debts generated by the previous growth cycle which, in turn, would force the economy to grow faster in the future in order to pay more interest in an infernal spiral of growth and debt. Six years after the 15-M movement, it is time to delve into the emergent Spanish cultural sensibilities that have been gaining visibility and questioning the dominant imaginary of economic growth since that unique historical moment. These new sensibilities are forcing many Spanish literary and cultural scholars to rethink their disciplines. While some cultural critics are discussing relevant issues like multiculturalism, neoliberal biopolitics, socioeconomic degradation, digital culture, and urban processes, the most interesting critical responses reckon with all of these factors holistically and relate them to the root of the crisis: the cultural logic of a socially and environmentally unsustainable growth imaginary.

The most generative interventions targeting the relationship between the economic crisis and Spanish culture are perhaps to be found in three journals’ recent special issues: ‘La imaginación sostenible: culturas y crisis económica en la España actual’, Hispanic Review 80, no. 4 (2012); ‘Democracia y capitalismo: la función de la cultura’, ALCESXXI 1 (2013); and ‘Spain in Crisis: 15-M and the Culture of Indignation’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 15, no. 1–2 (2014).