TY - JOUR
T1 - The cannibal wave
T2 - the cultural logic of Spain’s temporality of crisis (revolution, biopolitics, hunger and memory)
AU - Méndez, Germán Labrador
N1 - Funding Information:
In the summer of 2013, another Saturn appeared on a wall of an abandoned house in the old fisherman district of Setúbal, an area where, before the arrival of the crisis, the process of gentrification was well underway. This Portuguese Saturn was dressed as an extra-terrestrial god, his face covered in tentacles. It formed part of the invasive fantasy of a Troika Attack (Figure 8), a retelling of Portugal’s financial bailout in terms of an alien invasion. Here, Saturn is the Troika (la Troika is the group of representatives from the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank). Its sovereign body represents and simplifies the diffuse complexity of the financial rescue. The graffiti-writer placed one lone monster with many protrusions to capture the proliferation of the so-called “men in black”. But this graffiti still contains an interesting aesthetic-political twist: the giant devourer of men has been painted very small, opposed
Publisher Copyright:
© 2014, © 2014 Taylor & Francis.
PY - 2014/4/3
Y1 - 2014/4/3
N2 - Abstract: This article analyses how hunger and guillotines, revolution and food, butchers and protests are connected in the Spanish collective imaginary during the current temporality of crisis (2008–2013), with the aim of establishing its cultural grammar. By examining different representations of the crisis by means of gastronomy – including examples of graffiti and slogans, cooking TV shows and horror movies – I will describe the existing tensions between practices of resistance and collective imaginations of violent political change. I will propose that the social circulation of food and food images is a decisive contributing factor in the symbolic landscape of the crisis, shaping divided political economies according to the role of the citizens, the state or the corporations in control and the management of the collective access to nutritional goods. Pig slaughter versus the supermarket of the gods: two political universes offer their opposing poetic poles. On one side we will find (i) the subaltern logic of the popular distribution of proteins acquired, thanks to a founding act of communal violence (the slaughter of the pig). On the other side we recognize (ii) disciplinary, hegemonic logics based on the masking of biopolitical links between nutrition, economy and society (the supermarket of gods).
AB - Abstract: This article analyses how hunger and guillotines, revolution and food, butchers and protests are connected in the Spanish collective imaginary during the current temporality of crisis (2008–2013), with the aim of establishing its cultural grammar. By examining different representations of the crisis by means of gastronomy – including examples of graffiti and slogans, cooking TV shows and horror movies – I will describe the existing tensions between practices of resistance and collective imaginations of violent political change. I will propose that the social circulation of food and food images is a decisive contributing factor in the symbolic landscape of the crisis, shaping divided political economies according to the role of the citizens, the state or the corporations in control and the management of the collective access to nutritional goods. Pig slaughter versus the supermarket of the gods: two political universes offer their opposing poetic poles. On one side we will find (i) the subaltern logic of the popular distribution of proteins acquired, thanks to a founding act of communal violence (the slaughter of the pig). On the other side we recognize (ii) disciplinary, hegemonic logics based on the masking of biopolitical links between nutrition, economy and society (the supermarket of gods).
KW - 15-M movement
KW - biopolitics
KW - cannibalism
KW - gastronomy
KW - hunger
KW - popular culture
KW - Spanish crisis
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U2 - 10.1080/14636204.2014.935013
DO - 10.1080/14636204.2014.935013
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84926208100
SN - 1463-6204
VL - 15
SP - 241
EP - 271
JO - Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies
JF - Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies
ER -