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B O O K R E V I E W

Postgrowth Imaginaries: New Ecologies and Counterhegemonic

Culture in Post-2008 Spain. By Luıs A. Pradanos. Liverpool UP,
2019. 240 pp. Hardcover $45.00.

At the heels of years of rising inequality and last October’s uncharacter-

istically dire Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
report—affording humans a mere twelve years to avert the most dev-
astating consequences of climate change—comes Luıs Pradanos’
Postgrowth Imaginaries, a compelling manifesto for the power of narra-
tives to shape non-catastrophic futures. Pr adanos does not mince
words in his diagnosis of the planetary crisis: “The problem is not a
lack of growth but rather the globalization of an economic system
addicted to constant growth, which destroys the ecological planetary
systems that support life on Earth while failing to fulfill its social prom-
ises” (1). “The global economic crisis,” he continues, “is thus better de-
fined as a crisis of the growth imaginary.” Impending environmental,
economic, and social calamity notwithstanding, Pradanos prefers not
to catastrophize. Instead, he argues that “in order to encourage an ef-
fective political ecology[,] other kinds of counterhegemonic narrative
are much more effective”: “stories and projects that envision and per-
form desirable (emphasis in original) postgrowth imaginaries” (33).
Post-2008 Spain, with its effulgence of radical movements amidst pro-
longed economic crisis, “offers an ideal context to investigate these
cultural processes” (1). Pradanos’ treatise on recent peninsular
“counterhegemonic narratives and radical cultural shifts” compel-
lingly combines environmental cultural studies and postgrowth eco-
nomics to suggest possible paths to achieving the transformation this
moment demands.
The book’s economical first section introduces the reader to the cul-
tural, economic, and ecological landscape of twenty-first-century
Spain, highlighting emerging critiques of the neoliberal crisis and pro-
posing degrowth as an alternative to “mainstream Euro-American re-
form environmentalism” (31). Chapter two, “Urban Ecocriticism and
2 I S L E

Spanish Cultural Studies,” argues that urban humanities can and

should incorporate ecological critique while pulling off the no less
transformative operation of applying ecocritical analysis to works

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depicting urban areas rather than “natural” ones. In Chapter three, the
author examines works centered around castoff materials and spaces,
which he links to the production of “disposable humans.” Elsewhere,
Pradanos makes the provocative suggestion that Spain should apply a
post-colonial lens to itself when throwing off the mantle of Western
growth ideologies; however, his inclusion here of Jose Palazo n’s pho-
tography series “Desolation Landscapes” provides a stark reminder of
Spain’s profound historical implication in the production and abject
victimization of such “surplus populations” (206). In Chapter four,
“Disaster Fiction, the Pedagogy of Catastrophe, and the Dominant
Imaginary,” a withering review of the high-budget disaster film The
Impossible lays the groundwork for a turn to a “pedagogy of degrowth”
in order to begin the difficult task of imagining and materializing such
an alternative (228).
Postgrowth Imaginaries will be of particular interest to environmen-
tal humanities scholars: it takes the field’s foundational premise—that
“stories matter”—and pushes it a step further, arguing that not only
narratives but also criticism itself can become a “creative force” con-
tributing to the dissemination and promotion of alternate paradigms
(8). I am especially interested in Pradanos’ deft justification for the link-
ing of economic and cultural critique: he argues that neoliberalism is
“deleterious in a double sense, both semiotically and biophysically,”
destroying both imaginaries and biospheres (20). This is a significant
contribution to the field’s fledgling peninsular iteration, which has not
yet caught up to Spain’s ample output of counterhegemonic narratives
and movements. Pradanos builds on this foundation, citing, for exam-
ple, members of the renowned Barcelona-based Research & Degrowth
group. However, like many environmental humanities thinkers, he
fails to attend to the genealogy of feminist economists who drew criti-
cal attention to the growth paradigm years before R&D—even though
such feminists are particularly well represented in Spain.
The book is sure to engage Iberian and other cultural scholars, offer-
ing as it does a “systemic, posthumanist, and ecological understanding
of culture” (3). Indeed, throughout the book Pradanos analyses an im-
pressively wide array of cultural productions—from the habitual nov-
els, films, and documentaries to graphic novels and cartoons, songs,
and an “audiovisual experiment,” a website, a street mural in Madrid,
and even an art installation made entirely of garbage—all of which call
attention to the excesses and failures of the neoliberal growth fantasy.
 Book Review 3

Finally, Pr
adanos’ clear and lucid writing affords Postgrowth
Imaginaries the potential to reach beyond the academy—to activists, for
example, who will appreciate the political vision textualized by its

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seamless integration of academic and activist principles. And yet,
Pradanos’ work lacks elements of political specificity that I would ex-
pect from a cultural studies work on contemporary Spain. For one
thing, though it is the Iberian issue most prominent in global headlines,
the Catalan independence movement is given nary a mention; in fact,
only cultural production in Spanish is considered. The book also
neglects the Spanish far right’s gathering momentum. Paradoxically, in
arguing against “post-political,” hegemony-affirming stances on cli-
mate change, Pradanos has adopted a somewhat post-political ap-
proach to his own subject matter, thus highlighting a difficulty in
writing about specific cultural contexts for a global (or in any case
Anglophone) audience.
There is certainly a danger in attempting to straddle such diverse
fields and choices of subject matter. However, it is what this moment
seems to demand. If we are truly in a moment of transition—not just
into the Anthropocene, but perhaps also out of capitalism, as Pradanos
suggests—then this shift will require new scopes and methodologies.
In this sense, Postgrowth Imaginaries is a pioneering work, as well as a
rousing call to “collectively create alternative, postgrowth stories we
can live by” (27).

Monica Tomàs
Rutgers University

ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (2019), pp. 1–3

doi:10.1093/isle/isz103
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