Within scholarship on Spain, the subfield of environmental cultural studies has been a growing field of interest, with individual essays and collected book projects asking how a cultural studies framework can productively intervene in the environmental humanities, urging scholars to analyze how cultural works represent the environment. The past two decades have also seen an increasing number of academic and cultural works about the “empty Spain” of the country’s depopulated interior regions as well as the massive infrastructural and social changes of the late-Francoist period. This panel proposes a concrete way – through the idea of temperature, hot and cold – to make connections between many of these interrelated discourses in the field and, more broadly, in the humanities today. Specifically, the panel proposes temperature as a way to comprehend and communicate what is often an abstract, scientific discourse on the environment and climate change. Environmental changes and the rhetoric surrounding them are, in spite of their material nature, often communicated through abstract terms and concepts – climate change, Anthropocene, etc. – but these changes are felt in moments of temperature discomfort: the exhaustion of an especially long heat wave, the discomfort of a room when the thermoregulating infrastructure fails, or the relief felt when one escapes the summer heat of a urban center to cooler locale. Each one of the interventions in this panel considers how cultural works can transmit these affects, considering the many tensions and interconnections between the desire for a comfortable, thermoregulated life and the discomfort of extreme temperatures.
The panel brings together a group of young scholars – one non-tenured assistant professor, one postdoc, and one PhD candidate – with diverse research interests. As the panel organizer and participant, I (Justin Berner) will briefly present the panel topic and will then discuss the role of fire in the 1981 quinqui film, Deprisa, Deprisa by Carlos Saura, studying how these scenes produce a haptic response of thermal discomfort that obliges the audience to consider the environmental destruction that accompanied Spain’s midcentury economic boom. In this paper, I bring my academic interests in media studies and the environmental humanities to offer an innovative reading on a well-known film and film genre. Luke Bowe considers the branding of Asturias – a small, verdant, and hilly region in Spain’s northwest – as a climate refuge tourism destination and the reactions of the region’s inhabitants, whose documentary films and music have responded to the dangers of tourism to local culture and identity. Luke’s intervention brings up the topic of overtourism in Spain, which has itself become a topic of increased interest in recent years, but does so in an innovative way, analyzing various cultural texts as a way to look forward to a future when lesser-known regions – far from Spain’s famed sunny coasts – become popular destinations to escape the heat. Finally, Renee Congdon looks at the postwar period, addressing how new technologies of thermoregulation promised the bourgeois homemaker effortless and unprecedented control over temperature. Studying both the rhetoric of advertising and descriptions of domestic spaces found in well-known novels from the period, Congdon analyzes how changing notions of social class and gender were used to promote temperature regulation as the final consumerist frontier of bourgeois comfort in Francoist Spain.
The panel will consist of a brief introduction, followed by three fifteen-minute presentations, with the remaining time to be used to field audience questions and allow for discussion.