Dancing Mastery: Unthinking Autonomy and De-Hierarchizing Dissidence through Fiction in the Contemporary Spanish State

This article argues that Julieta Singh’s decolonial redefinition of mastery provides an effective tool to analyse contemporary Spanish fiction concerned with precariousness and the materiality of artistic and cultural creativity. Engaging with Cristina Morales’ Lectura fácil (2018) and Greta García’s Solo quería bailar (2023), I argue that contemporary Spanish writers are advancing useful ways of dealing with the unsustainability and ultimately murderous effects of capitalist productivity. Fictions such as Lectura fácil and Solo quería bailar reveal the possibilities and challenges at play in oppositional politics and the limits of parliamentary politics (including the new politics resulting from the consolidation of political parties arising from assembly movements). Both texts also problematize the role that artistic capitalism has played in generating an image of the Spanish state as a modern, fully democratized and cosmopolitan space.