As the non-human turn gathered speed over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, critics of Iberian cultural production increasingly granted higher consideration to non-human species and inanimate objects as variously deserving of agency, rights, and analytical attention. Carrying out an eco-critical or post-humanist analysis can be more straightforward in cultural texts from the recent past, as contemporary authors and directors of novels, film, and other media are ensconced in the throes of myriad ecological crises and thus often create ample stages in their works for critique of the anthropocentric biases at the heart of concepts such as nature, culture, and conservation. However, the non-human turn also illuminates, retroactively, overlooked aspects of foundational texts and films from earlier in the Anthropocene, before it was referred to as such, to which scholars in Iberian Studies already have provided ample insight. In this chapter, I will focus specifically on the presence of the animal in texts produced during the Francoist dictatorship, as these works emphasize how modern systems of philosophical, cultural, and scientific understanding articulated the place of the human in relation to the lives of other species and inanimate objects. I will focus especially on the figure of the pigeon-dove in Mercè Rodoreda’s 1962 novel La plaça del diamant (The Time of the Doves). Animal life, even when relegated to symbolic practice, is central to the story of Iberian cultural production in the twentieth century.

The cultural status of animals and their symbolic weight in cultural production are of critical importance to some of the most celebrated novelists, poets, playwrights, and film directors of twentieth-century Spain. In numerous cases, animal life was mobilized during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco between 1939 and 1975 as part of intricate symbolic systems that attempted to critique Spanish society and politics while evading the Regime’s repressive crosshairs. The bull, perhaps the symbolic animal par excellence in Spain from the moment the Ancient Greek writer Strabo describes the Iberian peninsula as a stretched-out bull’s hide, was a frequent target. Luis Martín-Santos and Juan Goytisolo, prominent novelists who navigated the authoritarian structures of the Francoist Regime while nevertheless expanding the representational possibilities and thematic depths of the Spanish novel, criticized bullfighting in their literature and public writings as conceptually tied to masculinity, political violence, and anti-liberalism.

Across an array of disciplines – history, language and cultural studies, politics, anthropology – scholars have devoted attention to explaining how the growth and consolidation of consumer capitalism has become the dominant political and economic mode governing modern human life. Scholarly consensus has converged around the idea that, in order to understand how modern democracies work, the governing modes of economic culture that underpin them must be part of the picture. As university courses on “The History of Capitalism” proliferate throughout the Anglophone academy, there has emerged a corresponding interest in understanding the legacy of industrial modernity in terms of the things it leaves behind: its detritus. Books by Gay Hawkins, Susan Strasser, John Scanlan, and Maite Zubiaurre have analyzed rubbish from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, while feature films and documentaries have sought, through a progressive lens, to make visible what Gay Hawkins has called the “shit end of capitalism.” The Spanish documentary filmmaker Víctor Moreno has produced two films – Edificio España (2012) and La ciudad oculta (2018) – which investigate, through a critical lens, the metabolism of Spanish urban modernity and its mainly hidden spatial contours. In a similar key, Mercedes Álvarez’s documentaries El cielo gira (2004) and Mercado de futuros (2011) explore the spatial and temporal logics of a Spanish modernity that has been all too eager to relegate the past to the national wastebin.

As an unstable, relational category, “waste has impacts across multiple scales, linking diverse actors and processes.” In the field of Marxian cultural geography there is an ample and extremely useful bibliography on how urban and exurban space has been shaped by the forces of market capitalism to reproduce itself. In Spanish Studies, Compitello, Fraser, Vilaseca and others have outlined the various ways in which Spanish urban space has been progressively colonized by capital. Henri Lefebvre points to the shift occurring mainly during nineteenth-century industrialization wherein the metropolis was progressively transformed into use value, which meant that urban space was absorbed and incorporated into the market economy. Benjamin Fraser puts it succinctly when he notes that, since the nineteenth century, the Spanish city has become yet another product to sell as urban landscapes have been transformed into vehicles for financial speculation (p. 263).

Mamadou Gologo, a Malian minister and novelist, recounted his 1963 travels in China in La Chine, un peuple geant au grand destin (China: A Great People, A Great Destiny), which expresses a deep appreciation for the country. The above remark invokes British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s 1960 speech in Cape Town, in which he famously used the phrase ‘wind of change’ to describe the rapid growth in national consciousness. With seventeen African nations achieving independence, the year 1960 was dubbed the ‘Year of Africa’. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, few had predicted that a country located in the Far East would contribute significantly to that wind throughout the coming decades. Despite the prevalent perception that Communist China was a natural supporter of Africa’s anticolonial struggles, the early years of China-Africa relations were characterised by indifference, ambivalence, and estrangement, as much as by solidarity and friendship. ‘Brotherly strangers’ is my term for this intrinsic paradox. To write the history of Kenya’s and Zambia’s relations with China is to do more than simply amalgamate their respective nationalist historical trajectories. Indeed, there are three major dynamics to be observed in this transnational history. One of these is naturally the Chinese view of global events, which was translated into practical foreign policy. There is also a history of how China engaged with African actors on the ground. But what tends to be overlooked, and what is key to this study, were perceptions of ideas and values about Chinese engagement with Africa, especially when these concerned and were influenced by the anti-Communist fears of the late-colonial period.

This chapter analyses the development of ‘Red’ China’s foreign policy in the historical context of African decolonisation, which set the stage for increasing Afro-Asian engagement during the Cold War. It first discusses the Maoist dialectics which shaped China’s foreign policy and the changes they underwent over the course of practical experience with Africa and the wider world. It then traces the origins of AfroAsian solidarity and unpacks China’s activities in Africa in the wake of the Bandung Conference of 1955.

This was the question asked in 1980 by the editors of El Ecologista Comix, a special edition of the magazine El Ecologista, in a fictional interview with an imagined comics scholar opening the single issue of the comics collaboration, featuring well-known Spanish comics artists of the period, including Max and Xaquín Marín. Such a question hints not only at the medium’s fight for cultural legitimization but also at the innumerable possibilities afforded by the medium for initiating social change. Only some thirty years later would the question of comics’ capacity to engage with questions of environmental health, justice, and ethics receive sustained scholarly attention, despite the fact that the employment of comics for the purposes of environmental activism and literacy has a significant history. Within Spain, comics illustrate the concerns and proposals of early environmentalisms, often in ways that reflect the democratizing aesthetics of counterculture movements, as well as mobilizing resistance to neoliberal urbanization. Comics also reflect the mainstreaming of environmental concern and the exacerbation of environmental crises wrought by the globalization of consumer capitalism, and they employ graphic journalism and nonfiction to explore the destructive metabolism of Spanish cities or social justice concerns exacerbated by urban waste and development.

The ability of comics to develop an environmental politics and/or ecocritical approach to contemporary issues can be mapped onto two underlying concerns: first, the capacity of comics to influence and represent the subject’s “ethical orientation to the natural world,” which is not only developed through the graphic representation of ideas and icons but also through the simultaneous representation of subjects as objects, enmeshed within wider environments and ecologies of relation. This may also include the artist’s own self-representation within the comic, an ethical and stylistic choice that strengthens the reliability and sense of intimacy between artists and readers while emphasizing the constructed, contingent, and positional nature of narrative.

A second concern regards the ways in which comics artists present deeper ecocritical reflection and engage “ecological thought,” i.e., forms of inquiry, representation, and storytelling that emphasize the complex interrelations and interdependencies of multiple species and systems that make up planetary life.

This text begins with a landscape. With the image of a landscape (Figure 6.1): the old Mount Neme tungsten mine. Since World War I, the shortage in Europe of this mineral, key to the manufacture of projectiles and armor, endowed the Peninsular northwest with crucial strategic importance. Hitler secured the exploitation of the Iberian reserves in payment for German aid to General Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Later, the Korean War made Galician mining attractive again, sealing North American interest for the country’s incorporation into the capitalist bloc. Finally, after a short period of time, when all operations ceased, the presence of the mine was consigned to local community memory, and to the wounded memory of the landscape. Extraction had also damaged archaeological heritage: both lesser-known local sites and more well-known ones. With the metal extracted, stories about underground mythical dwellers, pagan cults, priestesses, and witches evaporated. The mine dug a crater also into the imaginary. This immense pit tells us about the death caused by the mineral that was extracted from it. And in its emptiness, a turquoise blue lake slowly formed – one of poisonous waters.

This lake was pictured at the center of the image mentioned above, and in the summer 2019 featured as part of the annual tourism campaign by the Galician State Government. As an immediate effect, a legion of instagrammers and like-hunters flocked to the scene in search of the ultimate selfie, even at the cost of getting intoxicated by the lake, as they later commented on in their own social media. The anecdote captures the aesthetic-political tension explored in this article, the one that occurs between memory and form, by involving our political relationships with the environment. Today, the digital circulation of images dissociates forms from the history that shaped them, and which explains their inscription in a given territory. History establishes the specific way in which a particular form still relates to the physical space where it has been conceived for a function. No matter how much digital replicas are offered as a transparent object for consumption, what we see in Monte Neme is still the residue of an extractive process. The burns on the influencers' bodies just confirm it.

As the Tajo and Tiétar Rivers flow toward the Portuguese border from mountain ranges in mid-eastern Spain, they approach one another and run parallel for almost 125 kilometers, without actually touching, prior to their confluence in what is today Monfragüe National Park in western Spain. In 1959, this particularity was attractive to engineers enrolled in the project of redistributing Spain’s waterways, a signature policy of the Franco dictatorship. The two rivers running alongside one another allowed for the construction of twin hydroelectric dams, with a tunnel serving as a spillway connecting the two reservoirs.

The morning of 22 October 1965, approximately 4,000 workers neared completion of the Torrejón-Tajo Dam project, moving at breakneck speed in the emptied out basin of the Tajo. Since many workers migrated from southern Spain, among other agrarian areas, their families traveled with them, living in makeshift tents above the river basin. As their families finished breakfast, Hidroeléctrica Española (now Ibérdrola) decided to test the maximum level of the reservoir located on the northern Torrejón-Tiétar. At this moment, a breach in the tunnel caused water to pour into the Tajo, killing (officially) 54 workers. While the number is likely to have been double, the event already constitutes the worst labor accident in Spain’s history (Monforte). Yet the disaster barely made the news. It appears the fascist regime learned from the Ribadelago disaster coverage in 1959, when at least 144 local people drowned after the Vega de Tera reservoir failed. If it were not for a monolith dedicated to the victims in 2016, the Monfragüe reservoirs would completely obscure what happened under their surface.

This history offers insight into the Francoist political ecology that dramatically re-shaped Iberian waterways through a rapid buildup of hydraulic infrastructure, or waterworks. Infrastructure itself is the subconscious of modernity: the below-structure that goes unnoticed when everything is fine, which Christopher Bollas calls an “unthought known” (Rubenstein, p. 576). Monfragüe suggests that investigating Francoist waterworks exposes infrastructure not as a public good but rather as a form of necropolitics, a political order arbitrarily deciding who lives and who dies. Yet this submergence zone remains largely unthought of, until a drought exposes what lies beneath. Even then, it is difficult to decipher such a sight without understanding the history of Francoist waterworks.

Introduction

Ecopoetics is, sensu stricto, the theory that underpins any poetic practice and any other literary form that makes ecology and environmental consciousness its foundation and starting point. As a true aesthetic speculation, and under the rubric of “Poetics of Breathing,” I have constructed a general ecocritical theory with the aim of making the metaphor of breathing agglutinate the different and even contending literary and critical tendencies within Hispanism that pay attention to the ecosystemic flows of life. But theoretical developments are an exception; most ecopoetics are not to be found in speculative hypotheses but implicitly in the practices of literary criticism of Spanish and Hispanic literatures and in Iberian cultural studies that involve environmental issues of literary interest. Most ecopoetics take the form of specific ecocritical studies on the voices of the earth that some poets hide, on the narratives of abandoned rural enclaves and migrations to cities, and on the wide range of approaches to animals in literature. Ecopoetics also permeates arts theory and practice when embedded in environmental concerns. In a broad sense, ecopoetics affects cultural studies that analyze post-growth imaginaries to question capitalism and its metabolic destruction of biological and epistemological diversity, the devastation of landscapes under the effect of the tourist industry, national regulation of biopolitical issues such as bullfighting, and cultural understandings of nature and legal texts on landscape and hunting. In a much broader sense, ecopoetics have an important presence in the many academic research practices that address the woes of economic “development,” animal ethics, the food industry, the role of nature in education, landscapes and ideology, minorities and law, gender and values, post-carbon societies, and other related topics, as these are all cultural issues of great significance for ecologically engaged narratives and poetries.

Ecopoetics responds to the current ecological crisis of planetary dimension and is the poetics of the Anthropocene and the future to come. Nevertheless, and as noted above, there are four main areas in which ecopoetics acquires a relevant role, all of them related, in descending order, to the original literary and theoretical foundations of the classical understanding of the word “poetics” as “a treatise on poetry or aesthetics” (Merriam-Webster): literary theory, literary criticism, environmental humanities, and cultural studies.

With more than 1,200 reservoirs and dams, Spain is the first country in Europe and the fifth globally in terms of the number of hydraulic structures. It is the global region with the highest installed hydroelectric capacity, which constitutes around 15 percent of the energy consumed in a territory where almost half of the river flows are dammed. Throughout the twentieth century, the country consolidated itself as a “hydraulic society,” a social order founded on the intensive management of water in which more than 500 towns were flooded, forcing the displacement of some 50,000 people, as well as the alteration of the affected ecosystems. Tens of valleys have been swamped, entire forests destroyed. The fluvial dynamics of many rivers have been modified and hydrographic networks fragmented, not to mention the impact all this has had on fauna and flora, especially in the Pyrenees.

The history of the Spanish state and its current physical configuration cannot be understood without considering the socio-ecological transformations derived from a political model in which, after the process of external decolonization at the end of the nineteenth century, a policy of internal recolonization was inaugurated. According to this model, problems associated with scarcity and unequal water distribution linked, in the country, “the promise of its modernity and its Europeanization to the need for greater control and better use of its water flows.” After the Civil War, the alignment of fascist nation-building dreams and the “regenerationist hydraulic utopia” with the interests of the nascent electricity industry led to the consolidation of territories of hydropower, making a common good such as water a lucrative business for electricity companies. Hydro-modernity during the Franco regime was seen as the main initiative to conduct what Eric Swyngedouw has labeled “Franco’s Hydro-Social Dream” in the Spanish countryside, where the 180 reservoirs in 1939 swelled to 800 by 1975. The project was inserted within the so-called “inward colonization” that was preceded by the elimination of the agrarian reform and the establishment of an entire institutional framework around the National Institute of Colonization (INC) in charge of its implementation.

Kenyan Trade with China, 1962–1980 (KSh)

In a landmark report from 2006, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations proclaimed a transcendent truth of our time: “climate change is the most serious challenge facing the human race.” Less familiar was the report’s demonstration that global livestock production is “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global” (p. xx). Here I cannot begin to summarize the cascading environmental catastrophes predicted to occur as the result of climate change in the coming decades. I will address only one major driver of climate change in relation to one of the most personal and culturally significant decisions we make every day: what food we eat in order to live. I will examine the Spanish agri-food system and Spain’s emblematic role in a global dietary shift that threatens the ecosystems that sustain human and non-human animal life. I will argue that in Spain, as in other high-income countries, an ethically rational response to climate change demands a rapid shift away from animal-source foods and toward plant foods or, as two of the greatest authorities on Spanish agroecology recommend, a “revegetarianization” of the national diet. I will link my environmental critique of the corporate-industrial agri-food system to a compassionate plea on behalf of one of the primary victims of Spanish agroindustrial efficiency: the pig. Finally, I will conclude with an homage to Spanish animalista (animal-rights) activists who have fought to reveal what most consumers strongly prefer to ignore and what meat producers increasingly fight to conceal: the misery of billions of factory-farmed animals worldwide who are enslaved by an environmentally devastating industry.

A vast scientific consensus now recognizes the unsustainability of current Western diets that are high in animal-source foods produced by intensive industrial farming systems. In a major 2020 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change summarized the conclusions of systematic research reviews by stating that the diets high in animal-source foods have a much higher environmental impact that those containing few or no animal-source foods, and that plant-based diets also produce significantly better human health outcomes.

The state of Kenyan politics as the 1960s drew to a close was a great disappointment to Chinese leaders: Oginga Odinga, the left-wing figure they had chosen to back, had been excluded from the ruling party KANU and subsequently marginalised on account of his position as the leader of a Communist-backed opposition. Economically, Kenya traded largely with Britain, while political and sociocultural exchange with China was minimal in comparison to that with the West. International organisations, however, provided meaningful platforms through which the Chinese government could engage with Kenyan leaders. Jomo Kenyatta’s distaste for Communism did not, for instance, deter him from supporting China on the issue of its UN membership. The normalisation of China-US relations in the 1970s also convinced the Kenyan leadership to reassess its policy towards China. The early 1980s witnessed simultaneous leadership transitions in Kenya and China: in 1980, President Daniel arap Moi met Deng Xiaoping in Beijing to discuss the future of Sino-Kenyan relations, which would be driven by economic interests and trade opportunities.

Zambia, by comparison, was a more unpredictable and surprising partner for the Chinese. President Kenneth Kaunda, whom the West had initially considered as a moderate, eventually developed his Humanism philosophy into an all-encompassing national ideology. Throughout the 1970s, his ruling United National Independence Party (UNIP) became increasingly authoritarian in character. The declaration of a one-party state in 1972 can be seen as the culmination of Kaunda’s supreme leadership over both party and state. Meanwhile in China, the new leadership was grappling with Mao’s revolutionary legacy and rehabilitation efforts in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. The result was, as this chapter will demonstrate, that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the increasingly left-wing UNIP came to believe that post-Mao China had been co-opted by US-led neo-imperialism. Even more problematic were the Sino-Zambian divisions with regard to southern African liberation movements.

Like other domestic animals, the Spanish fighting bull (Bos taurus Ibericus) is not technically wild. He does not live hidden away deep in a forest. He is no lion that threatens to kill human livestock. The Spanish fighting bull, however, can be compared to wild animals that have survived in the Anthropocene. In the orchestrated raising of Bos taurus Ibericus, humans oversee breeding and provide pastures for the bull to grow and thrive. Although domestic, humans create a wild space designed for the wild-like animal before he meets his fate at the hands of the bullfighter.

Humanity today is essentially a hunter of the last wild mammals, and humans essentially do the same with the few “wild” mammals remaining on the earth as they do with the Spanish fighting bull. The “hidden” forest where the hunted wild mammal lives is not really hidden from the hunter. Humans, not the wild animal, decide the fateful day when he or she must appear as object in the eye of the hunter’s weapon.

In contrast to most of the planet’s wild mammals, the population of the Spanish fighting bull did not fall to near oblivion over the last five centuries. If wild animals are to survive, what can they learn from the bull in order to convince humans to do all they can humanly do to keep them alive? What lesson should humans take from the bull so as to continue sharing the planet with the surviving wild animals?

The Spanish fighting bull can teach a humanities biogeography lesson to scholars in the field of environmental cultural studies. As a field, environmental cultural studies needs no introduction. The essays in this collection show that scholars of culture increasingly see it as their task to contribute to the betterment of the earth’s environment. Cultural studies has become a companion to the sciences because the subject offers its own tools for approaching ecological studies of the planet. For instance, it often is better equipped than the sciences in the rhetorical tools to effectively communicate models of human practice for bettering or rebuilding the planet’s ecology.

Exemplary of animals in the Anthropocene, bulls employed a brilliant strategy of survival that more animals need: they lived and prospered within a human-controlled ecosystem.