Solidarity or the Fictional Bubble. Disciplinary narratives and their resistances in Spain (and beyond) after 2008's

As part of a book-project, German Labrador Méndez (Princeton University), will reflect on the political imagination of the 2008’s crisis and its cultural implications, in the Iberian context and beyond. The past decade can be understood as a time marked by the anxieties of the economic turmoil and their inscription in bodies, urban spaces and ecosystems. The crisis, seen as a material and psychic entourage, has been reflected by literary products and visual fictions in media, movies, internet platforms and social networks thanks to a veritable grammar of terror. Tunnels, claustrophobic spaces, natural disasters, plagues, paranormal interventions and cataclysms, among other tropes, constitute easily traceable signs of a contemporary fictional repertory, one that helps decisively to frame the so-called crisis as a moment of emergency.

In this talk, Prof. Labrador Méndez will offer an analytical model to organize this rich flow of images connected to the crisis, based on a literary devise that he names the inmunitarian bubble, a symbolic mechanism that allow to read the economic logics of neoliberalism based on extractivism, alongside with the fictional moral logics of salvation and survival. Finally, he will conclude by arguing in favor of an alternative poetics of radical solidarity, with a Utopian dimension that burns the bubbles of exclusion that characterize the narratives of 2008’s crisis.

Department of Luso-Hispanic Studies, Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs, Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity and Academic Enrichment Fund.