Affective belonging in contemporary Spanish literature and film and the making of the multicultural city

This dissertation analyzes novels and films that highlight the affective connection between multicultural urban space and Spanish cultural identity and belonging from the 2000s on. Arguing that culture and urban space are mutually constitutive, affective notions, I ask how the arrival of immigrants to Spanish cities reveals and complicates this relationship. In the first chapter, I compare Lucía Etxebarria’s Cosmofobia (2007) and Fernando Colomo’s El próximo Oriente (2006) to explore how Spaniards grappled with multicultural community in the first decade of the twenty-first century, when the influx of migrants to Madrid’s urban core, especially Muslim migrants, brought about highly visible changes to historic neighborhoods such as Lavapiés. I place these two films in the context of the post-secular city and the inevitable intertwining of culture and religion in the articulation of Spanish identity itself. In the second chapter, I analyze two documentaries that help make sense of Spanish multiculturality in the context of the financial crisis of 2008 and the resulting housing market implosion, from which migrants suffered greatly. Through a comparison of Sílvia Munt’s La granja del pas (2015) and Las que nos fuimos (2014), a documentary created by the Ecuadorian embassy in Spain, I consider migrants’ everyday spatial praxis as a means of transcending both anti-capitalist rhetoric and identity politics in the shaping of the multicultural city. The third chapter focuses on autofictive narratives by migrants in Madrid, Lilian Pallares’s Ciudad sonámbula (2010) and Sergio Galarza’s El paseador de perros (2009). Through a comparison of their protagonists’ affective inhabiting of the city, I conclude that the creation of multicultural space depends upon the free flow of affect, whereas the control of affect within the confines of a neoliberal political ecology or politically correct multiculturalism leads to ideological or nostalgic iterations of place.