Katarzyna Beilin | University of Wisconsin-Madison (original) (raw)
Books by Katarzyna Beilin
ACME, 2020
In 2016 Maya beekeepers engaged in protests against the planting of genetically modified (GM) soy... more In 2016 Maya beekeepers engaged in protests against the planting of genetically modified (GM) soy in Campeche. The Mexican federal government had financially supported GM soy plantations, grown in Yucatan predominantly by Mennonite communities, due to the high price soy could fetch on international food markets. These plantations, however, were soon linked to deforestation, water contamination, and human and bee illness and death. The conflict between Maya beekeepers and the Mexican government was triggered by the European Union’s rejection of Mexican honey exports due to statutorily unacceptable levels of GM pollen contamination in 2011. This led to significant financial losses for the beekeepers of Yucatan—most of whom were and are of Maya ethnicity. The Maya beekeepers demanded of the state authorities that GM soy be forbidden on basis of their “right to culture,” a constitutionally protected right in Mexico, and in 2017 the Mexican Agency SENASICA (Servicio Nacional de Sanidad, Calidad e Inocuidad Agroalimenaria) revoked its original 2011 permission to plant and commercialize GM soy in seven Mexican states, including all states on the Yucatan peninsula, where Maya beekeepers are concentrated. GM soy growers appealed this decision, and the pesticide and seed corporations lobbied the government until this prohibition was once more lifted in August 2019. In the first week of November 2019, however, the newly nominated director of the powerful state agency CONACYT (Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología), Elena Álvarez Buylla, herself a world-renowned plant geneticist, announced her support for Mayan bees and blamed GM soy for their decline. Soon after, the government of Andres Manuel López Obrador promised to prevent plantation of GM soy.
Our research in Yucatan brought to light many of the complexities that are not obvious in this story. Our conversations with Maya people revealed that they are equally concerned for the Apis mellifera bees that produce honey for export as they are for the sacred Melipona stingless bees, which are dependent on Yucatan’s diminishing forests, and their milpas, the subsistence form of polyculture agriculture that can restore an entire forest in a period of 30 years. Maya people are also worried about the toxic flow of pesticides and sewage from crop fields and animal farm enclosures as it enters underground water basins, threatening health and contaminating their sacred cenotes (Polanco and Beilin, 2019). Overall, the Mayas see industrial agriculture as an encroachment on their land, and indeed a continuation of centuries of European-American colonization. They have come to realize that unless they mobilize their cultural knowledge to react to these threats, their livelihood, heritage, and memory will become collateral damage. In this way, the struggle for bee health has initiated an ongoing process of political organization and cultural revival within Maya communities that has roused various social actors, such as artists, poets, scientists, business leaders, politicians, lawyers, international foundations and activists who built an alliance in support of the Maya people “bioculture” (Rosado May, 2016).
Journal of Agrarian Change, 2020
The growing crisis of bee health has shone a spotlight on the problems facing pollinator populati... more The growing crisis of bee health has shone a spotlight on the problems facing pollinator populations in many parts of the world, the worrying implications for agriculture and ecosystems , and some of the risks of pesticides. Although this attention is important and can open a range of critical vistas, the threats to bees, other pollinators, and the future of pollination are too often framed in narrow ways. The goal of this paper is to provide a systematic way of thinking about the crisis of bee populations by examining the changing dynamics of pollination within industrial agriculture, drawing heavily on transformations in the United States and Canada. We set out a case for understanding pollination as a biophysical barrier to industrial organization and the rise of pollination services as a response that temporarily fixes (or overrides) this barrier, while containing an internal set of contradictions and overrides. We argue that these dialectic relations are continually generating further problems and hope that this lens can help inform critical education, outreach, and movement building with respect to the urgent problems of bee and pollinator health. In particular , we stress the need to connect growing bee-related advocacy with struggles to confront industrial capitalist agriculture. We confirm that this work is original and has not been published elsewhere, nor is it currently under consideration for publication elsewhere.
Review of In Search of Alternative Biopolitics by Carrie Douglass
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
In this groundbreaking work, Katarzyna Olga Beilin demonstrates how the violence perpetrated amon... more In this groundbreaking work, Katarzyna Olga Beilin demonstrates how the violence perpetrated amongst humans has its roots in humanity's attitude towards animals and the environment. The distance created by the human/animal divide is the first step at a discourse that permits those regarded as " animals " to be tortured or destroyed for our own ends. As these acts of violence are applied to humans and our environment, inevitably this destroys humankind, as well. Beilin examines bullfighting and its imbrication in a deadly Spanish national biopolitics as one cultural extension of the human/animal divide, drawing on Foucault and Agamben's theories of biopolitics and bare life, as well as interviews, performance theory, and ethnography. In contrast to the vast majority of studies on bullfighting by Hispanists and anthropologists, Beilin not only analyzes pro-bullfighting stances, but also engages with the discourses and efforts of the anti-bullfighting movement over the past two centuries, demonstrating the positive change that it has effected on society at large over time. Beilin begins the work by demonstrating how the juxtaposition of human and animal is at the foundation of modern biopolitics in Spain. Specifically, Beilin analyzes the symbolic power of bullfighting and the arguments that have been advanced both for and against the practice. As a national feast, bullfighting figures centrally in debates on national identity, tradition, masculinity, love and death, and other topics that structure a state biopolitics as well as alternative discourses of resistance. Key to this is Achille Mbembe's concept of necropolitics which, when applied to the biopolitics of bullfighting, becomes a spirituality that connects eroticism to violence and sacrifice. Via linguistic and cultural frames, this rhetoric builds, maintains, and justifies oppressive regimes that kill and let die. This morbid spirituality has been a cornerstone of Spanish " difference " and claims of superiority over other cultures, a claim that carries with it deep contradictions: while on the one hand the bullfighter, and by extension the Spanish people, seem to be freer, able to confront death with courage, this actually animalizes them. Just as the bullfighter, in the dance of 'kill or be killed,' becomes " bare life " in the ring, so do the Spanish people, manipulated by the rhetoric of necropolitics and spirituality, sacrifice themselves for the elites in wars. Bullfighting is thus used as a tool to manipulate as well as to provide catharsis, in which the people take out their anger and frustrations on the bull, instead of seeking real social change. Beilin demonstrates how Hispanism has been complicit in promoting this necropolitics of Spanish identity, beginning with the postwar Hispanists in exile, who, in addition to promoting the literature of the Generation of 27 and a love of the Republic,
This chapter analyzes Spanish debates on these aspects of the national culture that connect viole... more This chapter analyzes Spanish debates on these aspects of the national culture that connect violence to the erotic while representing it in human/animal relations, as García Lorca defines it in his lecture “La teoría y el juego del duende” (Theory and play of el duende, 1932) where he exemplifies it in bullfighting. While Lorca envisions bullfighting as an exercise of freedom, in the eyes of its critics this kind of search leads to freedom loss. This predicament is reflected upon in Buñuel’s Phantom of Liberty in the context of Spanish relations with the French and Buñuel’s Las hurdes (1933) can be interpreted as dark humor about the Spanish people’s intimacy with death due to extreme poverty rather than heroic bullfighting adventures. Pedro Almodóvar’s Matador (1988) not without dark humor analyzes its erotic implications and focuses on the bullfighter’s/filmmaker’s dependence on the public’s taste. Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves (2012) connects the aesthetization of violence and death in bullfighting to trauma, disability, and abandonment in everyday life of the bullfighter and bullfighters’ child which can stand for the Spanish nation. Berger shows how bullfighting culture provides a context where poor and simple are easily taken advantage of by the greedy and manipulative. Human/animal dynamics has been the foundation of Spranish modern biopolitics, and it is at the core of the "spirituality" that has accompanied this biopolitics and facilitated its adnimistration. Animality has been implied in the definition of Spanish national character and in Spanish difference and superiority over other cultures. Complexity characterizes the function of animal in Spanish narratives. On one hand, humanity has been defined in the bullfighting culture as superiority over the animal, one the other, the Spanish alleged superiority over other cultures has been due to Spanish being able and willing to be like an animal, to be bare flesh in front of death.
While the intellectuals with the most symbolic capital during the period of transition to democra... more While the intellectuals with the most symbolic capital during the period of transition to democracy, attempted to inscribe democratic values onto bullfighting, or alternatively promoted A Spanish democracy with bullfighting values, the animal rights movement was formed at the grassroots level. This paper analyzes discourses and performances of three different organizations acting for the sake of transformation of the relations between the humans and animals as well as attempting to change the symbolic space of animals in Iberian cultures. It concludes that in spite of the lack of electoral success, the movement as a whole has had a strong transforming influence in Spain.
Beilin takes readers on a journey through currents of alternative thought in Spanish culture, wea... more Beilin takes readers on a journey through currents of alternative thought in Spanish culture, weaving through writings, films and life stories whose authors and protagonists are acutely aware that “the question of the non-human,” in particular in the land of bullfighting masculinities, is key not only to environmental sustainability, but also to political freedom, and equality.
The contributors to Ethics of Life: Contemporary Iberian Debates ask the following questions: ... more The contributors to Ethics of Life:
Contemporary Iberian Debates ask the
following questions:
n What are the different rhetorical
strategies employed by writers,
artists, filmmakers, and activists to
react to the degradation of life and
climate change?
n How are urban movements using
environmental issues to resist
corporate privatization of the
commons?
Ethics of Life
Contemporary Iberian Debates
Edited by KATARZYNA BEILIN and WILLIAM VIESTENZ
n What is the shape of Spanish
debates on reproductive rights and
biotechnology?
n What is the symbolic significance of
the bullfighting debate and other
human/animal issues in today’s
political turmoil in Spain?
Katarzyna Beilin and William Viestenz
The Environment in Literature and the Arts in Spain
Carmen Flys-Junquera and Tonia Raquejo
Nunca Máis: Ecological Collectivism and the Prestige Disaster
John H. Trevathan
Tourism and “Quality of Life” at the End of Franco’s Dictatorship
Eugenia Afinoguénova
Die and Laugh in the Anthropocene: Disquieting Realism
and Dark Humor in Biutiful and Nocilla experience
Katarzyna Beilin
Cultivating the Square: Trash, Recycling, and the Cultural
Ecology of Post-Crisis Madrid
Matthew Feinberg and Susan Larson
Degrowth and Ecological Economics in Twenty-First-Century
Spain: Toward a Posthumanist Economy
Luis I. Prádanos
Reproductive Rights in Spain: From “Abortion Tourism” to
“Reproductive Destination”
Pablo de Lora
Mar adentro and the Question of Freedom
Paul Begin
Still Different? Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture in Spain
Sainath Suryanarayanan and Katarzyna Beilin
Iberian Cultural Studies beyond the Human: Exploring the
Life History of Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja in Spanish
Anthropology and Popular Film
Daniel Ares López
The Bull Also Rises: The Political Redemption of the Beast in
La pell de brau by Salvador Espriu
William Viestenz
Animals in Contemporary Spanish Newspapers
John Beusterien
Accounting for Violence, Counting the Dead: The Civil War
and Spain’s Political Present
Sebastiaan Faber
Afterword
Spain: Taking the Alternative?
Martín López-Vega and Luis Martín-Estudillo
(Forthcoming) In Search of an Alternative Biopolitics: Anti-Bullfighting, Animality, and the Env... more (Forthcoming)
In Search of an Alternative Biopolitics: Anti-Bullfighting, Animality, and the Environment in Contemporary Spain by Katarzyna Olga Beilin takes readers on a journey through the history of alternative thought that challenges mainstream understandings of the relations between the human and nonhuman realms. Weaving through the works of Mariano José de Larra, Eugenio Noel, Luis Buñuel, Luis Martín-Santos, Pedro Almodóvar, Pablo Bérguer, Juan Mayorga, and Rosa Montero, Beilin convincingly demonstrates that “the question of the animal” has long been of particular significance for Spanish culture.
Analyses of the synergy of press debates on bullfighting and the War on Terror, as well as media debates on King Juan Carlos’s hunt in Botswana and his resignation, reveal how the concepts structuring human/animal relations condition national biopolitics. Beilin traces a main principle, where sacrifice of some lives is deemed necessary for the sake of others, from bullfighting, through environmental destruction and immigration policies, to bioeconomy. Ultimately, In Search of an Alternative Biopolitics argues that to address ever-increasing threats of global warming and future catastrophes, we urgently need to redefine concepts structuring the human and the nonhuman realms.
Page 1. CONVERSACIONES LITERARIAS CON NOVELISTAS Page 2. Page 3. CONVERSACIONES LITERARIAS CON NO... more Page 1. CONVERSACIONES LITERARIAS CON NOVELISTAS Page 2. Page 3. CONVERSACIONES LITERARIAS CON NOVELISTAS CONTEMPORÁNEOS Katarzyna Olga Beilin Page 4. Page 5. Colección Támesis SERIE A ...
ACME, 2020
In 2016 Maya beekeepers engaged in protests against the planting of genetically modified (GM) soy... more In 2016 Maya beekeepers engaged in protests against the planting of genetically modified (GM) soy in Campeche. The Mexican federal government had financially supported GM soy plantations, grown in Yucatan predominantly by Mennonite communities, due to the high price soy could fetch on international food markets. These plantations, however, were soon linked to deforestation, water contamination, and human and bee illness and death. The conflict between Maya beekeepers and the Mexican government was triggered by the European Union’s rejection of Mexican honey exports due to statutorily unacceptable levels of GM pollen contamination in 2011. This led to significant financial losses for the beekeepers of Yucatan—most of whom were and are of Maya ethnicity. The Maya beekeepers demanded of the state authorities that GM soy be forbidden on basis of their “right to culture,” a constitutionally protected right in Mexico, and in 2017 the Mexican Agency SENASICA (Servicio Nacional de Sanidad, Calidad e Inocuidad Agroalimenaria) revoked its original 2011 permission to plant and commercialize GM soy in seven Mexican states, including all states on the Yucatan peninsula, where Maya beekeepers are concentrated. GM soy growers appealed this decision, and the pesticide and seed corporations lobbied the government until this prohibition was once more lifted in August 2019. In the first week of November 2019, however, the newly nominated director of the powerful state agency CONACYT (Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología), Elena Álvarez Buylla, herself a world-renowned plant geneticist, announced her support for Mayan bees and blamed GM soy for their decline. Soon after, the government of Andres Manuel López Obrador promised to prevent plantation of GM soy.
Our research in Yucatan brought to light many of the complexities that are not obvious in this story. Our conversations with Maya people revealed that they are equally concerned for the Apis mellifera bees that produce honey for export as they are for the sacred Melipona stingless bees, which are dependent on Yucatan’s diminishing forests, and their milpas, the subsistence form of polyculture agriculture that can restore an entire forest in a period of 30 years. Maya people are also worried about the toxic flow of pesticides and sewage from crop fields and animal farm enclosures as it enters underground water basins, threatening health and contaminating their sacred cenotes (Polanco and Beilin, 2019). Overall, the Mayas see industrial agriculture as an encroachment on their land, and indeed a continuation of centuries of European-American colonization. They have come to realize that unless they mobilize their cultural knowledge to react to these threats, their livelihood, heritage, and memory will become collateral damage. In this way, the struggle for bee health has initiated an ongoing process of political organization and cultural revival within Maya communities that has roused various social actors, such as artists, poets, scientists, business leaders, politicians, lawyers, international foundations and activists who built an alliance in support of the Maya people “bioculture” (Rosado May, 2016).
Journal of Agrarian Change, 2020
The growing crisis of bee health has shone a spotlight on the problems facing pollinator populati... more The growing crisis of bee health has shone a spotlight on the problems facing pollinator populations in many parts of the world, the worrying implications for agriculture and ecosystems , and some of the risks of pesticides. Although this attention is important and can open a range of critical vistas, the threats to bees, other pollinators, and the future of pollination are too often framed in narrow ways. The goal of this paper is to provide a systematic way of thinking about the crisis of bee populations by examining the changing dynamics of pollination within industrial agriculture, drawing heavily on transformations in the United States and Canada. We set out a case for understanding pollination as a biophysical barrier to industrial organization and the rise of pollination services as a response that temporarily fixes (or overrides) this barrier, while containing an internal set of contradictions and overrides. We argue that these dialectic relations are continually generating further problems and hope that this lens can help inform critical education, outreach, and movement building with respect to the urgent problems of bee and pollinator health. In particular , we stress the need to connect growing bee-related advocacy with struggles to confront industrial capitalist agriculture. We confirm that this work is original and has not been published elsewhere, nor is it currently under consideration for publication elsewhere.
Review of In Search of Alternative Biopolitics by Carrie Douglass
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
In this groundbreaking work, Katarzyna Olga Beilin demonstrates how the violence perpetrated amon... more In this groundbreaking work, Katarzyna Olga Beilin demonstrates how the violence perpetrated amongst humans has its roots in humanity's attitude towards animals and the environment. The distance created by the human/animal divide is the first step at a discourse that permits those regarded as " animals " to be tortured or destroyed for our own ends. As these acts of violence are applied to humans and our environment, inevitably this destroys humankind, as well. Beilin examines bullfighting and its imbrication in a deadly Spanish national biopolitics as one cultural extension of the human/animal divide, drawing on Foucault and Agamben's theories of biopolitics and bare life, as well as interviews, performance theory, and ethnography. In contrast to the vast majority of studies on bullfighting by Hispanists and anthropologists, Beilin not only analyzes pro-bullfighting stances, but also engages with the discourses and efforts of the anti-bullfighting movement over the past two centuries, demonstrating the positive change that it has effected on society at large over time. Beilin begins the work by demonstrating how the juxtaposition of human and animal is at the foundation of modern biopolitics in Spain. Specifically, Beilin analyzes the symbolic power of bullfighting and the arguments that have been advanced both for and against the practice. As a national feast, bullfighting figures centrally in debates on national identity, tradition, masculinity, love and death, and other topics that structure a state biopolitics as well as alternative discourses of resistance. Key to this is Achille Mbembe's concept of necropolitics which, when applied to the biopolitics of bullfighting, becomes a spirituality that connects eroticism to violence and sacrifice. Via linguistic and cultural frames, this rhetoric builds, maintains, and justifies oppressive regimes that kill and let die. This morbid spirituality has been a cornerstone of Spanish " difference " and claims of superiority over other cultures, a claim that carries with it deep contradictions: while on the one hand the bullfighter, and by extension the Spanish people, seem to be freer, able to confront death with courage, this actually animalizes them. Just as the bullfighter, in the dance of 'kill or be killed,' becomes " bare life " in the ring, so do the Spanish people, manipulated by the rhetoric of necropolitics and spirituality, sacrifice themselves for the elites in wars. Bullfighting is thus used as a tool to manipulate as well as to provide catharsis, in which the people take out their anger and frustrations on the bull, instead of seeking real social change. Beilin demonstrates how Hispanism has been complicit in promoting this necropolitics of Spanish identity, beginning with the postwar Hispanists in exile, who, in addition to promoting the literature of the Generation of 27 and a love of the Republic,
This chapter analyzes Spanish debates on these aspects of the national culture that connect viole... more This chapter analyzes Spanish debates on these aspects of the national culture that connect violence to the erotic while representing it in human/animal relations, as García Lorca defines it in his lecture “La teoría y el juego del duende” (Theory and play of el duende, 1932) where he exemplifies it in bullfighting. While Lorca envisions bullfighting as an exercise of freedom, in the eyes of its critics this kind of search leads to freedom loss. This predicament is reflected upon in Buñuel’s Phantom of Liberty in the context of Spanish relations with the French and Buñuel’s Las hurdes (1933) can be interpreted as dark humor about the Spanish people’s intimacy with death due to extreme poverty rather than heroic bullfighting adventures. Pedro Almodóvar’s Matador (1988) not without dark humor analyzes its erotic implications and focuses on the bullfighter’s/filmmaker’s dependence on the public’s taste. Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves (2012) connects the aesthetization of violence and death in bullfighting to trauma, disability, and abandonment in everyday life of the bullfighter and bullfighters’ child which can stand for the Spanish nation. Berger shows how bullfighting culture provides a context where poor and simple are easily taken advantage of by the greedy and manipulative. Human/animal dynamics has been the foundation of Spranish modern biopolitics, and it is at the core of the "spirituality" that has accompanied this biopolitics and facilitated its adnimistration. Animality has been implied in the definition of Spanish national character and in Spanish difference and superiority over other cultures. Complexity characterizes the function of animal in Spanish narratives. On one hand, humanity has been defined in the bullfighting culture as superiority over the animal, one the other, the Spanish alleged superiority over other cultures has been due to Spanish being able and willing to be like an animal, to be bare flesh in front of death.
While the intellectuals with the most symbolic capital during the period of transition to democra... more While the intellectuals with the most symbolic capital during the period of transition to democracy, attempted to inscribe democratic values onto bullfighting, or alternatively promoted A Spanish democracy with bullfighting values, the animal rights movement was formed at the grassroots level. This paper analyzes discourses and performances of three different organizations acting for the sake of transformation of the relations between the humans and animals as well as attempting to change the symbolic space of animals in Iberian cultures. It concludes that in spite of the lack of electoral success, the movement as a whole has had a strong transforming influence in Spain.
Beilin takes readers on a journey through currents of alternative thought in Spanish culture, wea... more Beilin takes readers on a journey through currents of alternative thought in Spanish culture, weaving through writings, films and life stories whose authors and protagonists are acutely aware that “the question of the non-human,” in particular in the land of bullfighting masculinities, is key not only to environmental sustainability, but also to political freedom, and equality.
The contributors to Ethics of Life: Contemporary Iberian Debates ask the following questions: ... more The contributors to Ethics of Life:
Contemporary Iberian Debates ask the
following questions:
n What are the different rhetorical
strategies employed by writers,
artists, filmmakers, and activists to
react to the degradation of life and
climate change?
n How are urban movements using
environmental issues to resist
corporate privatization of the
commons?
Ethics of Life
Contemporary Iberian Debates
Edited by KATARZYNA BEILIN and WILLIAM VIESTENZ
n What is the shape of Spanish
debates on reproductive rights and
biotechnology?
n What is the symbolic significance of
the bullfighting debate and other
human/animal issues in today’s
political turmoil in Spain?
Katarzyna Beilin and William Viestenz
The Environment in Literature and the Arts in Spain
Carmen Flys-Junquera and Tonia Raquejo
Nunca Máis: Ecological Collectivism and the Prestige Disaster
John H. Trevathan
Tourism and “Quality of Life” at the End of Franco’s Dictatorship
Eugenia Afinoguénova
Die and Laugh in the Anthropocene: Disquieting Realism
and Dark Humor in Biutiful and Nocilla experience
Katarzyna Beilin
Cultivating the Square: Trash, Recycling, and the Cultural
Ecology of Post-Crisis Madrid
Matthew Feinberg and Susan Larson
Degrowth and Ecological Economics in Twenty-First-Century
Spain: Toward a Posthumanist Economy
Luis I. Prádanos
Reproductive Rights in Spain: From “Abortion Tourism” to
“Reproductive Destination”
Pablo de Lora
Mar adentro and the Question of Freedom
Paul Begin
Still Different? Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture in Spain
Sainath Suryanarayanan and Katarzyna Beilin
Iberian Cultural Studies beyond the Human: Exploring the
Life History of Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja in Spanish
Anthropology and Popular Film
Daniel Ares López
The Bull Also Rises: The Political Redemption of the Beast in
La pell de brau by Salvador Espriu
William Viestenz
Animals in Contemporary Spanish Newspapers
John Beusterien
Accounting for Violence, Counting the Dead: The Civil War
and Spain’s Political Present
Sebastiaan Faber
Afterword
Spain: Taking the Alternative?
Martín López-Vega and Luis Martín-Estudillo
(Forthcoming) In Search of an Alternative Biopolitics: Anti-Bullfighting, Animality, and the Env... more (Forthcoming)
In Search of an Alternative Biopolitics: Anti-Bullfighting, Animality, and the Environment in Contemporary Spain by Katarzyna Olga Beilin takes readers on a journey through the history of alternative thought that challenges mainstream understandings of the relations between the human and nonhuman realms. Weaving through the works of Mariano José de Larra, Eugenio Noel, Luis Buñuel, Luis Martín-Santos, Pedro Almodóvar, Pablo Bérguer, Juan Mayorga, and Rosa Montero, Beilin convincingly demonstrates that “the question of the animal” has long been of particular significance for Spanish culture.
Analyses of the synergy of press debates on bullfighting and the War on Terror, as well as media debates on King Juan Carlos’s hunt in Botswana and his resignation, reveal how the concepts structuring human/animal relations condition national biopolitics. Beilin traces a main principle, where sacrifice of some lives is deemed necessary for the sake of others, from bullfighting, through environmental destruction and immigration policies, to bioeconomy. Ultimately, In Search of an Alternative Biopolitics argues that to address ever-increasing threats of global warming and future catastrophes, we urgently need to redefine concepts structuring the human and the nonhuman realms.
Page 1. CONVERSACIONES LITERARIAS CON NOVELISTAS Page 2. Page 3. CONVERSACIONES LITERARIAS CON NO... more Page 1. CONVERSACIONES LITERARIAS CON NOVELISTAS Page 2. Page 3. CONVERSACIONES LITERARIAS CON NOVELISTAS CONTEMPORÁNEOS Katarzyna Olga Beilin Page 4. Page 5. Colección Támesis SERIE A ...
A Companion to Spanish Environmental Cultural Studies, Jan 17, 2023
Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies
Humanities
Since the Green Revolution, the development of agriculture has been measured by the relation betw... more Since the Green Revolution, the development of agriculture has been measured by the relation between the chemical input (fertilizers and pesticides) and yield. Other factors, such as deforestation, water pollution, biodiversity loss and the loss of human health, were not part of these calculations. With the advent of genetically modified monocrops in the 1990s, GM soy in particular, plantations took over larger surfaces of land, accelerating these negative processes on a previously unknown scale. It has become clear that if this type of agriculture persists, toxic plantations will soon consume the planet. One of the phenomena prompting this awareness in different places of the world was the death of bees. ¿Qué les pasó a las abejas?, directed by Adriana Otero and Robín Canul, relates the environmental conflict between GM soy growers in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, and Mayan beekeepers. Not long after the arrival of GM soy to Yucatan, the bees began to die. When their honey was rej...
Journal of Agrarian Change, 2020
The growing crisis of bee health has shone a spotlight on the problems facing pollinator populati... more The growing crisis of bee health has shone a spotlight on the problems facing pollinator populations in many parts of the world, the worrying implications for agriculture and ecosystems, and some of the risks of pesticides. Although this attention is important and can open a range of critical vistas, the threats to bees, other pollinators, and the future of pollination are too often framed in narrow ways. The goal of this paper is to provide a systematic way of thinking about the crisis of bee populations by examining the changing dynamics of pollination within industrial agriculture, drawing heavily on transformations in the United States and Canada. We set out a case for understanding pollination as a biophysical barrier to industrial organization and the rise of pollination services as a response that temporarily fixes (or overrides) this barrier, while containing an internal set of contradictions and overrides. We argue that these dialectic relations are continually generating further problems and hope that this lens can help inform critical education, outreach, and movement building with respect to the urgent problems of bee and pollinator health. In particular, we stress the need to connect growing bee‐related advocacy with struggles to confront industrial capitalist agriculture.
Letras Hispanas, 2017
This essay proposes a theoretical framework and some conceptual tools and inter-disciplinary alli... more This essay proposes a theoretical framework and some conceptual tools and inter-disciplinary alliances for Iberian environmental cultural studies. We understand this emerging field as an open space for research and debate within an area of encounter among environmental humanities, cultural studies, Iberian studies and other fields. The theoretical framework and conceptual tools we propose are based on a paradigm change that entails a radical reconsideration of conventional ways of understanding the relations between the human and nonhuman life and matter at different levels (ethical, political, epistemological, ontological, historiographical, geographical, and economic). The adoption of this paradigm shift in Iberian studies allows, in the first place, understanding with greater clarity the connections, interactions or hybridizations among entities located at both sides of the old divides between nature and culture, or society and the environment. Secondly, it allows recognizing that the historical agency of human actors is always constrained and mediated by other entities (such as animals, plants, technologies, minerals, soils, and waters) with which people are constantly enmeshed. Thirdly, this paradigm change points to the interconnection between material and semiotic processes. Lastly, it entails positing new and flexible geo-cultural frames that account for the mobility, materiality and vulnerability of life in the Iberia Peninsula as well as its links with other spaces.
Environmental Cultural Studies Through Time, 2019
Environmental cultural studies (ECS) searches for a multidimensional understanding of pressing is... more Environmental cultural studies (ECS) searches for a multidimensional understanding of pressing issues that affect human communities, in connection to their material environments. ECS, like cultural studies, researches relationships between power structures and everyday practices of life, but it moves from anthropocentric understanding focusing on all biotic communities and matter. ECS is particularly interested in how semiotic and material processes interact within nature-cultural relations. We look at how culture and politics not only produce natures and environments (at once materially and semiotically), but also at how chemical organic and inorganic substances move through matter, ecosystems, and bodies, affecting the ways people think, act, and organize. This leads us to see that we cannot protect ourselves without protecting nature, and that we cannot protect nature by separating it from ourselves.
Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies
Confluencia: Revista Hispánica de Cultura y Literatura
Environmental Humanities, 2017
Based on multidisciplinary archives as well as fieldwork and interviews, this article focuses on ... more Based on multidisciplinary archives as well as fieldwork and interviews, this article focuses on the intertwined nature of movements of resistance by humans and plants struggling against genetically engineered soy monocultures in Argentina, which we provocatively conceptualize as interspecies resistance. Roundup Ready (RR) soy is genetically engineered to be resistant to the herbicide Roundup, which is intended to eliminate all unwanted plants except for the main crop. In response to the repeated applications of Roundup, however, weeds, of which the most aggressive have been varieties of amaranth, mutated and evolved resistance to the herbicide. We explore how, due to this “biological” resistance of so-called super weeds, human anti-RR-soy activism has picked up, and how both kinds of resistance are interconnected. In exploring human entanglements with RR-soy and super weeds (in particular, amaranth that also has edible varieties), we follow Anna Tsing in asking how different plants mediate particular social arrangements. Moved by on-the-ground realities and inspired by Donna Haraway’s provocation that “knowledge is always better from below,” we contrast the discourses of agribusiness, mediated by satellite technology from above, with views from below, where other senses join sight, focusing on the struggle for survival of fumigated humans and weeds. In our story, while RR-soy has become a
“bright object” of Argentinean agriculture, drawing to its orbit multiple human and nonhuman entities in aggressive pursuit of profits, close to the ground, weeds and the poisoned people rise up as “rogue objects” subverting “the gravitational force” of soy.
"Milpa-Melipona-Maya: Mayan Interspecies Alliances Facing Agribiotechnology in Yucatán", 2020
This paper examines an environmental conflict between Mayan communities and governmental authorit... more This paper examines an environmental conflict between Mayan communities and governmental authorities in Mexico's Yucatan region. Mayan beekeepers attributed severe economic losses in honey production to the expansion of genetically engineered (GE) soy plantations. Beekeeping of Apis mellifera or "European" honey bees for the purposes of honey export is a key source of livelihood for Mayan communities. Mayan beekeepers mobilized to bring about a moratorium on GE-soy planting, but GE-seed corporations and farmers persuaded the government to lift the moratorium. We show that there is much more to the Mayan beekeepers' resistance than their livelihood stakes in "European" bees. Focusing on historically shaped
Journal of Agrarian Change, 2020
The growing crisis of bee health has shone a spotlight on the problems facing pollinator populati... more The growing crisis of bee health has shone a spotlight on the problems facing pollinator populations in many parts of the world, the worrying implications for agriculture and ecosystems , and some of the risks of pesticides. Although this attention is important and can open a range of critical vistas, the threats to bees, other pollinators, and the future of pollination are too often framed in narrow ways. The goal of this paper is to provide a systematic way of thinking about the crisis of bee populations by examining the changing dynamics of pollination within industrial agriculture, drawing heavily on transformations in the United States and Canada. We set out a case for understanding pollination as a biophysical barrier to industrial organization and the rise of pollination services as a response that temporarily fixes (or overrides) this barrier, while containing an internal set of contradictions and overrides. We argue that these dialectic relations are continually generating further problems and hope that this lens can help inform critical education, outreach, and movement building with respect to the urgent problems of bee and pollinator health. In particular , we stress the need to connect growing bee-related advocacy with struggles to confront industrial capitalist agriculture. We confirm that this work is original and has not been published elsewhere, nor is it currently under consideration for publication elsewhere.
Journal of Agrarian Change, 2020
The growing crisis of bee health has shone a spotlight on the problems facing pollinator populati... more The growing crisis of bee health has shone a spotlight on the problems facing pollinator populations in many parts of the world, the worrying implications for agriculture and ecosystems, and some of the risks of pesticides. Although this attention is important and can open a range of critical vistas, the threats to bees, other pollinators, and the future of pollination are too often framed in narrow ways. The goal of this paper is to provide a systematic way of thinking about the crisis of bee populations by examining the changing dynamics of pollination within industrial agriculture, drawing heavily on transformations in the United States and Canada. We set out a case for understanding pollination as a biophysical barrier to industrial organization and the rise of pollination services as a response that temporarily fixes (or overrides) this barrier, while containing an internal set of contradictions and overrides. We argue that these dialectic relations are continually generating further problems and hope that this lens can help inform critical education, outreach, and movement building with respect to the urgent problems of bee and pollinator health. In particular, we stress the need to connect growing bee‐related advocacy with struggles to confront industrial capitalist agriculture.
Environmental Cultural Studies Through Time, 2019
In 20th century, amaranth has been rediscovered as crop that could defend vulnerable areas of the... more In 20th century, amaranth has been rediscovered as crop that could defend vulnerable areas of the world from hunger due to its tolerance for drought and poor soil. It still constitutes a minor cereal crop in the global scale, but as a labor intensive and resilient plant that does not benefit much from pesticides or genetic modification but supplies high quality nutrition, it models an alternative to neoliberal pesticide-driven monocrop agriculture and factory farming. This paper rewrites the history of human relations with amaranth in one of its centers of origin, Tehuacán Valley (Puebla, Mexico) since the times of Aztecs, through its colonial demise, till its rebirth in Proyecto Alternativas, aimed at remediation of poverty due to drought. While doing this I transform Toledo and Barrera-Bassols’ (2009) concept of biocultural memory to consider this memory as a hybrid phenomenon formed through interactions between humans and plants and viewing plants’ adaptation strategies as “living thoughts” (Kohn, 2013).
This volume has two parts. First contains presentations and summaries of cutting edge research ar... more This volume has two parts. First contains presentations and summaries of cutting edge research articles contained in _Ethics of Life_ printed volume. The second is shaped by the dialogical engagement of authors with each other's work, not without differences and disagreements, that are negotiated by various of the co-authors in the COOP Conclusion.
This article analyzes the cultures of the alternative economies that have emerged in Spain as a r... more This article analyzes the cultures of the alternative economies that have emerged in Spain as a response to not only economic crisis, but also climate change and global warming. After drafting a conceptual map of alternative economies, the essay focuses on a number of local environmental projects in Spain that can be considered as examples of " alternative biopolitics ". These projects involve networks of human and non-human realms such as other species, crops, the monetary economy, the metaphors that render relations between human and non-human life, and alternative constructions of the meaning of life. The second section problematizes contemporary purely eco-systemic perspectives by introducing considerations of individual fulfillment and happiness. In the conclusion, the alternative economies are reconsidered in light of future scenarios in which their impact as well as individuals' well-being may vary significantly. Bringing together frameworks of cultural studies and environmental studies, and juxtaposing systemic ecological analysis with narratives of individual happiness and frustration, this article offers a new approach to understanding alternative economies as novel environmental cultures of great potential importance for the future of the planet. Resumen Este artículo analiza las alternativas económicas y culturales que han surgido en España como resultado de la crisis de 2008, pero también como respuesta a la crisis ambiental y el calentamiento global. Tras trazar un mapa de las economías alternativas, el ensayo se enfoca en una serie de proyectos ambientales considerándolos como ejemplos de una " biopolítica alternativa ". Estos proyectos incluyen redes de ámbito humano y no-humano, como, por ejemplo, otras especies, cultivos, la economía del dinero, las metáforas que expresan las relaciones entre la vida humana y no humana, así como también construcciones alternativas del sentido de la vida. La sección final problematiza la perspectiva ecológica, considerando las posibilidades de la satisfacción y felicidad individual. En conclusión, las economías alternativas se reconsideran a la luz de escenarios futuros, según los cuales su impacto en el bienestar individual puede variar de modo importante. Conectando los marcos de los estudios culturales y ambientales, y yuxtaponiendo un acercamiento sistémico de la ecología y las narrativas individuales de la felicidad y frustración, este artículo ofrece un análisis innovador de las economías alternativas como culturas ambientales con un enorme impacto en el futuro planetario. Palabras clave: economías alternativas, restauración medioambiental, monedas locales, estudios de la felicidad.
HIspanic Issues Online, 2019
This essay defines Environmental Cultural Studies as a transdisciplinary platform within Environ... more This essay defines Environmental Cultural Studies as a transdisciplinary platform within Environmental Humanities that examines relationships between power structures and every day practices of adaptation and resistance, where power fluxes are conducted not only by humans but also non-human forms of life and matter. This platform allows for a multidimensional understanding of the processes which are simultaneously cultural and environmental in the context of today’s conjoined crises: ecologic, political, economic and, as we argue, also conceptual and discursive. We discuss the need for alternative epistemologies, knowledges from below, and a new understanding of responsibility in the interconnected globalized world. We point to the need to free critical thought from the neoliberal time economy, to connect research and activism, and, in the face of the urgency of change, we suggest focusing research on the issues that matter the most.
Call for an interdisciplinary volume, tentatively entitled Environmental Cultural Studies Through... more Call for an interdisciplinary volume, tentatively entitled Environmental Cultural Studies Through Time: Hispanic World. I am wondering if you would be interested in contributing. If so, please send me a few lines. Feel free to pass it to anyone who could be interested.
Possible topics could include: Cultural Studies Analysis of Past and Present Environmental Conflicts and Debates in the Hispanic World. Environment and Cultures of Time. Revival of Indigenous Cultures of Environment. Slow Violence. Environmentally Focused Economic Theories Emerging from Hispanic Cultures. Urban and/or Rural Alternative Cultures and Economies Focused on Environmental Sustainability and Justice. Transatlantic Environmental Exchanges. Climate Fictions as a Commentary on our Destructive Present. Cultures and Plants. Cultures of Wilderness. Animals, Cultures and Environments. Culture as an Environment. Past, Present and Futures of Agri-Cultures. Environmental Poetry, Art and Performance. Environmental Activism as Culture. Cultures of Energy. Cultures of Water. Cultures of Eco-Tourism. Humanities, Science and the Environmental Crisis. Humanities in the Interdisciplinary/Transdisciplinary Environmental Projects. And more. (Feel free to suggest).
In their recent article "Crisis, Change and The Humanities." Annabel Martín and Txetxu Aguado call humanities' scholars to think "how to recover our place in the world" and point out that our mission is "to encourage a deep self-awareness on behalf of its researchers, students, and practitioners of the supreme complexities of the world through the development of an interdisciplinary paradigm for continued, life-long learning." What can humanities do in the context of the conjoined and deepening environmental and political crises?
Latin American activists struggling against increasingly widespread monocultures of genetically m... more Latin American activists struggling against increasingly widespread monocultures of genetically modified (GM) Roundup Ready (RR) soy have enrolled a relatively new ally-- the amaranth plant. Amaranth has become Monsanto’s worst nightmare since a wild variety crossed with RR-soy and acquired the gene that made it resistant to the herbicide Roundup. Activists deploying amaranth, especially in Argentina and Paraguay, grant it human-like agency in ways that draw on pre-Columbian cultural discourses, which equip the biologically transformed amaranth with a symbolic power. We propose to integrate approaches from science & technology studies, biology, and cultural studies toward constructing a multidimensional interpretation of the social, cultural and environmental transformations of the Argentinian and Paraguayan countryside by RR-soy and the interspecies resistance to this enacted by disposed farmers, activists and the plant of amaranth.
Hispanic Issues On Line, 2019