Neorruralismo insular gallego en Sibila (2021), de Rosa Aneiros

Abstract

Abstract

This article analyzes Sibila (2021), by Rosa Aneiros, as a paradigmatic example of contemporary Galician neo-rural literature and its treatment of insular peasant memory. Based on a theoretical framework that combines memory studies, biopolitics, and heritage criticism, it argues that the novel articulates a structural parallelism between territorial dispossession and reproductive dispossession, revealing how state heritage policies operate simultaneously on community territories and female bodies. The analysis is organized around two complementary narrative mechanisms: temporal reconstruction through flashbacks, which function as devices for recovering a collective memory in danger of extinction, and the spatialization of that memory in micro-spaces that act as archives of community experience. It concludes that insularity is not an accessory element but rather a constitutive part of the work’s critical argument: the limited scale of the island territory allows for the implementation, with exceptional radicalism, of neoliberal management dynamics of rurality—depopulation, museumification, biopolitical control—that operate in a more diffuse manner in continental rural spaces and that, precisely because of this concentration, are particularly visible and analyzable here. The novel's generic hybridization—noir, dystopia, and certain features of autofiction—is interpreted as a strategy that is functionally consistent with its project of denouncing the structural violence of contemporary patrimonial capitalism on peripheral rural communities.