Broken Promises: Precarity and Affect in Contemporary Spanish Poetry after 2011

• Autores: Carlos Varón González
• Localización: The Routledge Hispanic studies companion to twentieth and twenty-first century Spain: ideas, practices, imaginings / coord. por Eduardo Ledesma, Luisa Elena Delgado, 2025, ISBN 978-1-032-96468-3, págs. 499-509
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Laurent Berlant argues that thinking of objects of desire as “clusters of promises” helps explain our (frequently self-damaging) attachment to social practices and to the order they sustain. The 2008 Spanish mortgage crisis, whose impact is still dramatically felt, evinced the breaking of many such promises: Political, territorial and economic. The 15M protests seemed to mark the breaking point of Spanish citizen’s tolerance for representative politics and neoliberal capitalism. And yet, as soon as 2016, poet Fruela Fernández writes about the breaking of a new promise, that of the renewal of the left in the Spanish state. Late millennial poets saw the 15M mobilizations as a moment of truth in Spanish politics and in their own poetics as well. The broken promises of modern urban development, of (neo)liberal individualism and of representation held their own promise, poetic and political. A broken promise changed for a generation the meaning of the past and it reoriented them toward an alternative future, if not in the way we once expected or had wished for. The problem of futurity and reproduction (bodily and cultural) has become a new source of anxiety, but it is also the site where these poets see a potential for change. Across this instant of hope, followed by a new desencanto, we can trace three main constants in contemporary Spanish poetry: A crisis of poetic language unable to articulate a self-consistent political project, the desire to overcome an atomistic voice and, especially, a challenging struggle for spatial and temporal affective and political affiliation.