Organizer and Presider: Teresa M. Vilaros

Speakers: Edgar Illas, Rafael Fernandez, Guillem Colom-Montero, Teresa Vilaros

“Catalonia Under Stress” proposes a panel with four 12-minute presentations and a follow-up discussion on important global and local processes that are stressing Catalan society today, even to the point of trauma. The panel folds into the 2024 MLA theme of Joy and Sorrow.

Rationale: Catalan studies have focused extensively on the push for the region’s political independence often pointing to the set of economic, cultural, and political conditions as evidence of a local syndrome. By contrast, the papers in the proposed section, while acknowledging the stress and trauma such a process is exercising locally, contribute to current scholarly discussions from a different perspective: they describe such conditions as part and party of a global series of phenomena, including immigration, mass tourism, the dismantling of traditional rural and urban modes and habitats, and the effect the Anthropocene and its correlated climate change is already exercising on land and bodies. All papers address the discussion bringing to the fore literary, journalistic, and cinematic corpus.

Papers (Abstracts):

1. Edgar Illas, “Catalan Natural Wine: A Hyperpolitics of the Earth,” addresses the production of natural wine in Catalonia: “Natural wine does not simply refer to the adoption of sustainable methods and eco-friendly farming. More radically, it pursues a praxis of attunement and interaction with the grapevines and the planet opposed to the extractive economy of corporate capitalism and the consumerist society. As illustration, I will present the case of Celler La Gutina, situated in the border area of L’Empordà. The landscapes of this winery experience three complex disputes: first, the vineyards are regularly terrorized by the military exercises of the Spanish base located next to the property; second, the grapes grow alongside a series of prehistorical dolmens and menhirs that may connect them with the cosmos in enigmatic ways; and third, the fields are physically threatened by the expansive ambitions of the largest wine corporation of the region.The world of natural wine is a form of reaction to the hyperpoliticizing of the earth. My paper will examine some of the specific Catalan inflections of this global/local politics that may no longer be interpreted through modern categories such as resistance, utopia, revolution, and emancipation. I read this heterogeneous mix of warlike, alegal, anti-corporate, and cosmo-geological hyperpolitics as an intervention of survival."
2. Rafael Fernandez, “Costa Brava and the Objectification of Southern Europe” addresses the "structural changes, in terms of space, undergone since the sixties for the sake of accommodating increased tourism demands, with some of its towns having become a sort of spatial “standing reserves” for the tourist season. In Costa Brava’s territory, this phenomenon has been brought about by a culture of massive construction that originates in the late period of the Francoist regime, an period of uncontrolled urban development. I aim to explain how such a culture has created a general imbalance in some coastal towns, which remain empty for most of the year to be filled up in the two months that span the summer season. The perpetuation of this imbalance has exposed Costa Brava to a cycle of endless demand, where the region is plunged into a forgetfulness towards the emptiness or abandonment it is subjected to by its objectified condition—an errancy of sorts, where the territory lives in the shadow of the promise of its “jouissance”.
3. Guillem Colom-Montero, “Unsustainable Tourism, Climate Change, and Cultural Trauma in Contemporary Majorcan Culture” analyzes "the mushrooming of Majorcan cultural responses to overtourism. Fiction, poetry, travelogues, documentary film, and political cartooning all suggest a traumatic experience associated to the environmental and sociocultural effects of mass tourism on the island. The paper discusses how they (re)historicise the effects of tourism on the island through vocabularies and narratives of colonialism, invasion, destruction, illness, malaise and collective trauma. These narratives cannot be fully understood unless they are contextualized within the global discourses of climate trauma, revealing how tourism plays a central role in the environmental and sociocultural anxieties triggered by climate emergency."
4. Teresa Vilaros' paper, “D’Alcarràs i Suro a Magaluf Ghost Town: El cinema davant l’inostenible" dicusses three films by Carla Simon (2022), Mikel Gurrea (2022), and Miguel Angel Blanca (2021). The films address the traumatic reaction experienced by traditional coastal and rural communities exposed, traumatized, and re/con-formed by new and unsustainable modes of exploitation ranging from imposed from above alternative energy constructions such as rural windmills, to migrant sub-par work force exploitation and alcohol and pharma mass consumerism.