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  • In Search of an Alternative Biopolitics: Anti-bullfighting, Animality, and the Environment in Contemporary Spain by Katarzyna Olga Beilin
  • Mary-Anne Vetterling
Beilin, Katarzyna Olga. In Search of an Alternative Biopolitics: Anti-bullfighting, Animality, and the Environment in Contemporary Spain. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2015. Pp. 305. ISBN 978-0-81421-290-5.

In Search of an Alternative Biopolitics: Anti-bullfighting, Animality, and the Environment in Contemporary Spain fuses Animal Studies with Environmental Studies to produce a brilliant interpretation of contemporary Spain. On the book's cover, there is an image of a bull outside the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao created by painted semi-naked human bodies that is a striking visual representation of one of the principal motifs of this study: the bullfight as symbolized by both human and non-human animals. Beilin's extensive scholarship on the subject enlightens the reader on the various ways in which the bullfight can be used to interpret Spanish culture in the past and in the present. She pays special attention to the human and the non-human animal and demonstrates the parallels between the cruel mistreatment of both humans (women, the poor, and undocumented aliens) and animals in daily life and war to reveal the biopolitics in Spain, past, present, and future.

Attention is also paid to necropolitics, biotechnology, biocapitalism, bioeconomy, the Holocene and the Anthropocene. There is also an important discussion about Genetically Modified Organisms in Spain. In addition to discussing major Spanish thinkers such as Larra, Ortega y Gasset, Américo Castro, Unamuno, Noel, Savater, Casal, and Riechmann, she backs up her ideas with theories by Foucault, Latour, Haraway, Morton, Nussbaum, Agamben, Esposito, Bennett, Mbembe, Heise, and Derrida, to name of few of the leaders in the fields of Ecocriticism and Animal Studies.

Beilin's analysis of the animal world in Lorca, Buero Vallejo, Martín Santos (Tiempo de silencio), Pardo-Bazán, Clarín, Baroja, Mayorga (Las últimas palabras de Copito de Nieve, Palabra de perro, animales nocturnos, La paz perpetua), Goytisolo, Fernández Mallo (Nocilla Experience), Montero (Lágrimas en la lluvia), among other Spanish writers, is insightful and brilliant. Equally important are her analyses of animals in films by Buñuel (Las Hurdes, L'Age D'Or, and Le Phantôme de la liberté—especially the liberation of the zoo animals at the end), Saura (La caza), Berger (Blancanieves), Almodóvar (Matador), and Gonzalez Iñárritu (Biutiful). It is important to note that in this book she writes about animals in general, not just bulls, and adds, for example, some interesting facts about Copito de Nieve (the albino ape of the Barcelona zoo). There are, however, some areas that I wish the author had covered in her analyses. Although she mentions Goya's Tauromaquia she does not mention Picasso's works on the bullfight. Although she has an absolutely stunning analysis of animals in general in Buñuel's films, she fails to mention the bullfight in his La fièvre monte à El Pao. She could have also mentioned the bullfighter who is afraid of snakes in Almodóvar's Hable con ella. But these are minor omissions in a book that is brimming with an amazing amount of information and new ways of interpreting the role the animal world plays in Spanish culture and its important message for human and non-human animals on this planet. The breadth and depth of Beilin's scholarship and insights is dazzling.

The author's commentary on King Juan Carlos's disastrous elephant expedition and subsequent abdication is fascinating when viewed in terms of the way she has interpreted the treatment of animals in other literary and cultural contexts earlier in her book and serves to solidify her theory that a more harmonious relationship between humans, animals, and the environment needs to take place if life on this planet is to survive.

Other discussions of interest are Barcelona's ban on bullfighting, the Great Ape Project, Manolete, the Spanish obsession with death, animalization and anthropomorphism, ethical treatment of animals, the celebration of the International Day of Animal Rights, the War on Terror (torture of humans and animals), the role of synthetic life, Spain as a leader...

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