Ethics of Life

Description

The contributors ask the following questions:

• What are the different rhetorical strategies employed by writers, artists, filmmakers, and activists to react to the degradation of life and climate change?
• How are urban movements using environmental issues to resist corporate privatization of the commons?
• What is the shape of Spanish debates on reproductive rights and biotechnology?
• What is the symbolic significance of the bullfighting debate and other human/animal issues in today's political turmoil in Spain?

Hispanic Issues Series
Nicholas Spadaccini, Editor-in-Chief

Hispanic Issues Online
hispanicissues.umn.edu/online_main.html

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Italian
• European

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 24 mai 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780826520937
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Ethics of Life: Contemporary Iberian Debates
HISPANIC ISSUES • VOLUME 42
Ethics of Life: Contemporary Iberian Debates
Katarzyna Beilin and William Viestenz
EDITORS
Vanderbilt University Press
NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE
2016
© 2016 Vanderbilt University Press
All rights reserved
First Edition 2016
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America
The editors gratefully acknowledge assistance from the College of Liberal Arts and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the University of Minnesota; and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa
The complete list of volumes in the Hispanic Issues series begins on page 341 .
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file
LC control number 2015042855
LC classification number GE42 .E8445 2015
Dewey class number 179/.10946—dc23
Full record available at lccn.loc.gov/2015042855
ISBN 978-0-8265-2091-3 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-8265-2092-0 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-8265-2093-7 (ebook)
HISPANIC ISSUES
Nicholas Spadaccini, Editor-in-Chief
Luis Martín-Estudillo, Managing Editor
Ana Forcinito, Associate Managing Editor
Nelsy Echávez-Solano, Megan Corbin, and William Viestenz, Associate Editors
Cortney Benjamin, Scott Ehrenburg, Heather Mawhiney, and Pablo Rodríguez Balbontín Assistant Editors
*Advisory Board/Editorial Board
Rolena Adorno (Yale University)
Román de la Campa (Unversity of Pennsylvania)
David Castillo (University at Buffalo)
Jaime Concha (University of California, San Diego)
Tom Conley (Harvard University)
William Egginton (Johns Hopkins University)
Brad Epps (University of Cambridge)
David W. Foster (Arizona State University)
Edward Friedman (Vanderbilt University)
Wlad Godzich (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Antonio Gómez L-Quiñones (Dartmouth College)
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford University)
*Carol A. Klee (University of Minnesota)
Germán Labrador Méndez (Princeton University)
Eukene Lacarra Lanz (Universidad del País Vasco)
Tom Lewis (University of Iowa)
Jorge Lozano (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
Raúl Marrero-Fente (University of Minnesota)
Kelly McDonough (University of Texas at Austin)
Walter D. Mignolo (Duke University)
*Louise Mirrer (The New-York Historical Society)
Mabel Moraña (Washington University in St. Louis)
Alberto Moreiras (Texas A & M University)
Bradley Nelson (Concordia University, Montreal)
Michael Nerlich (Université Blaise Pascal)
*Francisco Ocampo (University of Minnesota)
Antonio Ramos-Gascón (University of Minnesota)
Jenaro Talens (Universitat de València)
Miguel Tamen (Universidade de Lisboa)
Teresa Vilarós (Texas A & M University)
Iris M. Zavala (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona)
Santos Zunzunegui (Universidad del País Vasco)
Contents
Introduction: Ethics of Life: Contemporary Iberian Debates
Katarzyna Beilin and William Viestenz
PART I: Genealogies of Ecological and Animal Rights Movements in Modern and Contemporary Iberia
1. The Environment in Literature and the Arts in Spain
Carmen Flys-Junquera and Tonia Raquejo
2. Nunca Máis : Ecological Collectivism and the Prestige Disaster
John H. Trevathan
PART II: Ecological Crisis and the Neoliberal Appropriation of Public Space
3. Tourism and “Quality of Life” at the End of Franco’s Dictatorship
Eugenia Afinoguénova
4. Die and Laugh in the Anthropocene: Disquieting Realism and Dark Humor in Biutiful and Nocilla experience
Katarzyna Olga Beilin
5. Cultivating the Square: Trash, Recycling, and the Cultural Ecology of Post-Crisis Madrid
Matthew Feinberg and Susan Larson
6. Degrowth and Ecological Economics in Twenty-First-Century Spain: Toward a Posthumanist Economy
Luis I. Prádanos
PART III: Iberian Bio-Power: Life as a Political Matter
7. Reproductive Rights in Spain: From “Abortion Tourism” to “Reproductive Destination”
Pablo de Lora
8. Mar adentro and the Question of Freedom
Paul Begin
9. Still Different? Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture in Spain
Sainath Suryanarayanan and Katarzyna Olga Beilin
PART IV: Reassembling the Archive through the Concept of Life
10. Iberian Cultural Studies beyond the Human: Exploring the Life History of Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja in Spanish Anthropology and Popular Film
Daniel Ares López
11. The Bull Also Rises: The Political Redemption of the Beast in La pell de brau by Salvador Espriu
William Viestenz
12. Animals in Contemporary Spanish Newspapers
John Beusterien
13. Accounting for Violence, Counting the Dead: The Civil War and Spain’s Political Present
Sebastiaan Faber
Afterword
Spain: Taking the Alternative?
Martín López-Vega and Luis Martín-Estudillo
Contributors
Index
Introduction
Ethics of Life: Contemporary Iberian Debates
Katarzyna Olga Beilin and William Viestenz
Among all the factors which have emerged with increasing visibility in the twenty-first century that contribute to changes in the definition of “life” and open new questions about its ethical treatment, the following are the most important for this volume: the raising of collective consciousness regarding ecological crises and especially climate change; the emerging biotechnologies of plant, animal, and human life enhancement developed in part as an answer to this crisis; and the consideration of nonhuman species as deserving of rights, which is possibly a resistance to the growing industrialization of agricultural practices. As these are debated in the context of present and future policy development, the historical archive is also revised as bioeconomy reconsiders the worth and the purpose of life. In the neoliberal economic framework, life becomes not only a means but also a material of production and is integrated into the market exchange processes driven by new biotechnologies. Today’s multifaceted crisis, happening simultaneously in ecological, political, and economic contexts, intensifies the alliance between science and economy, which claim to be able to maintain and enhance present “quality of life” through “innovations” focused on integrating all life, including intellectual life, into the market exchange. The need for financial profit motivates and manipulates the mission of research at the university and the notion of common good. In this framework, the humanities are expected to form public opinion in favor of scientific innovations of life. In the best tradition of cultural studies, however, this volume proposes to question rather than praise the relation between life and these new hegemonic discourses.
This volume focuses on the transformations in the understanding of the ethics of life resulting from the debates in the contexts of ecological crisis, biotechnological innovations and animal rights movement activism on the Iberian Peninsula. Methodologically, the articles in the volume will present interdisciplinary perspectives from the humanities, law, social sciences, and sciences in relation to existing debates and research, as well as the widely understood world of art: film, novels, and poetry. We propose to think about these changes in a way that connects them, as forms of resistance, to dominating discourses of economy and nation. We believe that changes in culture occur through a buildup of connections between diverse frames of new social movements, whether they are resisting or attempting to transform the status quo. But, we also want to honestly present disagreements and contradictions between philosophers, movements, and perspectives in order to provide food for thought about these so-timely matters to our prospective readers. We also hope that this volume may open new perspectives for Iberian cultural studies, which are immersed in a ferment of debates just as the essays of this volume are being conceived and written.
This Volume and the Field
Federico García Lorca (1932) famously argued that the Castillian and Andalusian “duende” that feeds off of Spain’s intimate relationship with death and is best represented in bullfighting, is superior to the “Galician angel” and “Catalan muse” while Spanish art as such is superior to the traditions of Germany, Italy, and others. José Bergamín, a friend of Lorca’s and one of the greatest propagators of bullfighting, in his exile in Mexico founded an editorial house, Séneca, and a journal, España peregrina , becoming an intermediary between the world of Spanish literature and American Hispanism. Another key figure providing foundations for the discourses of Hispanism was Américo Castro. In his influential lecture at Princeton University in 1940, Castro did not mention bullfighting, but similarly to Lorca and Bergamín, suggested that Spanish culture, due to its focus on questions of life and death, can offer a solution to the crisis of Western modernity excessively dominated by material questions. This idea of a violence-ridden spirituality has been repeated by various Hispanists dur ing the twentieth century and still can be heard today. In the first chapter of El espejo enterrado (1997) (Buried Mirror), entitled “La virgen y el toro” (The Virgin and the Bull), Carlos Fuentes claims that it is in the bullfighting ring where Spaniards find their cultural self and he opposes Spanish attitudes towards deat