The generative politics of presentism in post-15M Spain
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2021-08-01
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<jats:p>This essay revises post-15M movement political party landscape, emphasizing the intentional yet unusual use of the present within the New Left's organizing grammar. Against sectors of the traditional Left, who see presentism as a product of neoliberalism, I claim that in the post-15M conjuncture, the present constituted a battleground in the struggle for a dignified life. First, I focus on the Catalan left-wing nationalist party CUP's use of anarchist symbols to suggest that references to sabotage were deployed to disrupt parliamentary politics, forcing constant interruption. Second, I analyze Podemos founding member Iñigo Errejón's speech after the party's 2016 national election defeat, where his rhetoric linked the temporality of the present with anti-austerity protestors’ embodied presence. Last, I read the rise of neomunicipalisms as another iteration of presentism, aiming to politicize everyday life. To conclude, I advance that such material practices of “generative presentism” problematize presentism's assumed depoliticizing nature.</jats:p>
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Evinson, K (2021). The generative politics of presentism in post-15M Spain. Boundary 2, 48(3). pp. 169–190. 10.1215/01903659-9155789 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/32535.
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Katryn Evinson
Katryn Evinson is a scholar of modern and contemporary Iberian visual culture and literature. Her research examines the intersections of art and literature with capitalism, drawing on political theory, cultural theory, and political economy to analyze Spain’s role in global cultural and economic dynamics.
Her first book-length project, Sabotage: The Destructive Making of the Creative Economy in Neoliberal Europe, examines the resurgence of sabotage in Spain from the democratic transition through the long aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Rather than framing artistic sabotage as a purely aesthetic tradition—from the avant-garde to institutional critique—the book situates it within broader historical processes that enabled its return. These include the European Union’s deployment of the contemporary art world to advance the financialization of the economy through tourism and real estate. The book argues that Spain became a testing ground for the European Union’s shift from an industrial to a post-industrial model that promoted culture and creativity as economic drivers. Ultimately, it shows how sabotage, long a symbol of worker struggle, resurfaced in art to contest Spain’s neoliberal restructuring—specifically, the use of culture itself to promote and perpetuate neoliberalism.
In addition to her publications on Spanish cultural and political history, feminism, and environmental issues, she serves on the board of the Asociación de Literatura y Cine Español Siglo XXI (ALCESXXI), co-directs The Communal Hypothesis Research Group, is a research member of the Spanish government-funded project Rhythms of Feminized Labor in Spanish Visual Culture (1936-2022), and is on the advisory board of Revista Re-visiones.
Before coming to Duke, Katryn was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Core Curriculum at Columbia University, where she taught Contemporary Civilization. Her research has been supported by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Public Humanities Grant, Cornell’s Society for the Humanities, and the Fisher Center for Gender and Justice at Hobart & William Smith Colleges.
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