The City Unmapped: A Feminist Imagination of Urban Spaces in Javier Pérez Andújar’s Paseos con mi madre (2011)

Abstract

This chapter analyzes Javier Pérez Andújar’s Paseos con mi madre (2011) in light of recent transformations in contemporary Spain. Attending to the redesign of urban centers and peripheries, it explores their global capital subsumption made visible in Andújar’s novel. In dialogue with recent scholarship that has engaged with these transformations, the author reads Paseos through a feminist lens that sheds light on possibilities of renovation in and around the city space. By doing so, the author argues that the centrality of the trope of the ‘river’ and the ‘aged mother,’ as thematized in Paseos, evokes an urban imagination that challenges complex valences of a culture of commodification, sketching the potential of a future shaped by forms of sustainability.