Cultural engagements with the rural in contemporary Spain: manifestations and critical tensions

In recent years, rural landscapes and lives have become the focus of a steady trend in Spanish cultural production, a trend that has been accompanied by a bourgeoning of critical analyses of the rural in the academic field of Peninsular cultural studies (Castelló, López, and Miguélez-Carballeira Citationforthcoming; González del Pozo Citation2021; Ibarretxe Diego and Delgado Citation2022; Mora Citation2018; Valdivia Citation2017). Undoubtedly, the contemporary “rural turn” in Spanish cultural production is part of the wider, preexisting phenomenon of environmental concerns appearing within the arts and humanities. Read as a response to the planetary challenges posed by the climate emergency and by the exhaustion of the capitalist model of production and consumption, the adoption of ecocritical frameworks in cultural analysis has made room for renewed treatments of the rural, which is now seen in some quarters as a once-neglected domain where contemporary societies can access a repository of sustainable and collective practices that are essential for imagining livable futures (Carlow Citation2016; Flora Citation2018).