Basura: Cultures of Waste in Contemporary Spain Samuel Amago 9780813945910

What makes trash trash? How do we decide what to throw away? Driven by these questions and others, Samuel Amago takes us through the streets and alleys of Spain, sorting through recycling bins, libraries, social media, bookstores, and message boards in search of things that have been forgotten, jettisoned, forsaken. Ranging in topic from the transformation of urban space during the transition to democracy to a twenty-first-century sanitation strike that paralyzed Madrid for weeks, from the films of Pedro Almodovar to graphic novels about Spain's housing crisis, Basura presents an alternative story of contemporary Spanish culture through the lens of wasted things.

Not merely an environmental problem, the proliferation of trash is an indicator of the social, political, and economic processes that undergird late, neoliberal capitalism. In chapters on cinema, photography, archaeology, drawing, comics, literature, ecology, and urban design, Amago places waste objects into dialogue with the cultural practices and structures of power that have produced them. Drawing from archaeological, ecocritical, and new materialist approaches, Amago argues that discards possess agency and generate an array of effects. Just as trash never fully disappears but returns to haunt its creators, so history never vanishes despite being buried or ignored by official narratives. Basura considers the efforts of artists, writers, and designers for whom waste is a means to withstand cultural erasure.

About the Author
Samuel Amago is Professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia and coeditor of Consequential Art: Comics Culture in Contemporary Spain, among other books.

Reviews
An outstanding study of the production and representation of trash in contemporary Spain that provides an intriguing analysis of how society uses and refuses the material objects of everyday life. " -Jessica A. Folkart, Virginia Tech, author of Liminal Fiction at the Edge of the Millennium: The Ends of Spanish Identity



Book Information
ISBN 9780813945910
Author Samuel Amago
Format Hardback
Page Count 240
Imprint University of Virginia Press
Publisher University of Virginia Press
Series Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism
Weight(grams) 465g