As a major social struggle, drugs vehiculate all sorts of conflicts and inequalities, while they also challenge the very definition of the subject and its colonial and postcolonial epistemologies. Following the MLA 2020 Presidential Theme suggestion, literatures dealing with drugs have the power to explore the many ways of being human.
In the past decades relations between drugs, politics and culture have become a major topic for cultural studies and critical theory worldwide, thanks to the work of leading scholars such as Michael Taussig, Avital Ronnell and Paul B. Preciado. A large amount of literary and visual fictional and non-fictional products have shaped drug narratives, interconnecting pharmacological circulation and neoliberal globalization, opening an intense discussion about violence, migration, media and rights.
Notions such as gore–capitalism (Sayak Valencia), farmaco-pornography (Paul B. Preciado), and drugged text (Alberto Castoldi) fueled a vibrant academic conversation especially productive in the field of global Hispanophone cultural studies. They intersect American geopolitics and glocal cultures, both historically and today. From Mexican narco-corridos to Netflix’s well-praised fiction Narcos, from narratives of global war to drugged dystopias, a group of scholars in Latin American studies –among them Julio Ramos, Lizardo Herrera, Oswaldo Zavala– have discussed the cultural dimensions of a now mainstream phenomenon.
Similar research has been conducted in the Iberian field (i.e. Usó Arnal, Labrador, Beorlegi), mostly focused on the post-Francoist transition to democracy, when counter-cultural youth understood psychedelics and narcotics as part of frequently political and aesthetic project. However, dialogues on narco-fictions that assemble Iberian and Latin American perspectives are still missing. This panel seeks common ground, using the Galician case as a cultural and spatial bridge.
Being the western limit of the continent and due its geographical coastal features, Galicia has been, since the 1980's, one of the major points of entry for international narco-traffic in the European Union, and beyond, represents the coming-together of Latin American, African and Asian networks. This situation brought intercultural exchanges, economic growth, institutional corruption and social catastrophe, which also animated collective mythologies about Galicia, that will be further explored in this panel, attending to their historical importance and international dimension, mobilizing literature, visual fictions, media, youtube videos and other major and minor cultural artifacts.
In his paper, “Narratives and Spaces of Galician Narco-Capitalism,” German Labrador Mendez, chair of the panel, and the author of two books on related topics (Letras Arrebatadas and Culpables por la literatura), will propose a historical perspective of Galician narcopoetics since the 1970's as a process of globalization, linked to migration, modernization, transition to democracy, as well as European integration, consumerism and cultural memory. Viewing the transformation of the ancestral houses of the Galician nobility (pazos) into narco-spaces as well as their afterlives as tourist resorts, this intervention brings together literary fictions, oral testimonies and places of memory.
In his talk, “Addiction, Deracination and Modernization in Manuel Rivas”, Jose M. Rodriguez (an active scholar in the field of Global Iberia and Galician political-intellectual history) will analyze Rivas' first novel, Os comedores de patacas (1991), as an account of the uprooted condition of economically motivated internal migrants in urban Galicia. Being a faithful depiction of the late Transition’s dysfunctional consumer society, Os comedores discusses low income, unemployment and economic precarity in a context of addiction. Deracination is ironically figured through the inability to ingest boiled potatoes, the main staple in the diet of Galician peasants engaged in subsistence agriculture. The consumption of tubers and narcotics features prominently in Os comedores as part of Rivas’s potent revision of the novela do pazo (i.e. novel of aristocratic country life) and the novela do arrabaldo (i.e. novel of working class suburbs), the two major roots in Galician literature. In this debut novel, Rivas specifically engages with the heroin addiction epidemic that hit particularly hard Galicia’s coastal cities in the mid-to late 1980s.
Yasmina Aidi is writing her doctoral thesis on countercultural exchanges between Spanish and Moroccan peripheries that were specifically born out from the experimentation, circulation and commercialization of Hashish routes. In her presentation, “Transnational Countercultures: Galician-Rif Imaginaries of Hashish in the Strait of Gibraltar”, she will focus on the 1980's shift from contraband to narcotrafficking in the Strait of Gibraltar in relation to the creation of new urban subaltern heroes in Galicia and in Berber areas of Morocco. Within this context, the paper analyzes the creation of new representations that heroized alterity, ultimately providing social bonds of unity and identification between subjects with tense historical and geopolitical relationships. This shift in the cultural imaginary took place just as Galicia established connections with Colombia and the Rif professionalized its relationships with the established diasporas in Europe. Decades later this oral memory is brought back to be spectacularized and exoticized in television or written fiction (El Príncipe, El niño, Fariña, or Narcos).
Diego Espiña Barros specializes in contemporary Spain and Galicia, focusing on the representation of social and political violence and the traumatic past in novel, comics and film. In his paper, “Post-memory, Post-Identity and Global Narco-Fictions in Contemporary Galicia: the Fariña Phenomenon,” he will analyze the mainstream success of a journalistic essay by Nacho Carretero. Fariña (2015) represents the revisiting of a black-market era, when Galicia was “about to become another Sicily” (Manuel Rivas dixit). The post-Francoist autonomous government was funded in connection to the drug clans, while violence and anonymous victims danced to the pop music sound of the Movida. After two decades of complicit silence, Fariña’s success, as well as that of its TV adaptation, elaborate a collective trauma. They combine historical events with fictional situations to transform this market into a public and critical phenomenon that can be easily connected to other global narratives such as Narcos.