Postgrowth Imaginaries
P ART II U rban Ecologies chapter two U rban Ecocriticism and Spanish Cultural Studies Urban Ecocriticism and Spanish Cultural Studies 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 Scranton1 2.1. Spanish Urban Ecocriticism In 1999, Michael Bennett and David W. Teague complained about ‘the historical gap between environmentalism, cultural studies, and the urban experience’.2 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’.3 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 1 Scranton, Learning to Die, 85–86. 2 Michael Bennett and David W. Teague, ‘Urban Ecocriticism: An Introduction’, in The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban Environments, ed. Michael Bennett and David W.
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