Politics of Culture in the Chávez Era

Lisa Blackmore researches the aesthetics and politics of modernity in Latin American and Caribbean art, architecture, and visual culture. She has published Spectacular Modernity: Dictatorship, Space and Visuality in Venezuela, 1948-1958 (2017), co-edited Downward Spiral: El Helicoide’s Descent from Mall to Prison (2018) with Celeste Olalquiaga, and co-directed the documentary Después de Trujillo (2016), with filmmaker Jorge Domínguez Dubuc which assessed the spatial legacies and memory politics of the dictactorship of Rafael Trujillo. Lisa joined the University of Essex as Lecturer in Art History and Interdisciplinary Studies in 2017. Her current research explores art and liquid ecologies in the context of modernity/coloniality and environmental decline.Rebecca Jarman researches the intersections between culture and politics in Latin America, particularly the conflicts surrounding urbanization in the twentieth century. She is currently working on a monograph entitled Representing the barrios: Culture, Politics and Poverty at the Margins of Caracas. This is based on her doctoral research, undertaken at the University of Cambridge with the support of a Mallinson Scholarship. The book analyses materials including novels, short stories, films, newspaper reports, political essays, and song lyrics to unpick the complex relationship between populism, the oil industry and urban poverty. Developing from this is a project that archives discursive responses to the destruction caused by landslides in Andean towns and cities and the tensions ensuing during the reconstruction process.Penélope Plaza is a Venezuelan architect, researcher and urban artivist. She researches the entanglements between oil, politics, culture, and urban space, with particular interest in contemporary Venezuelan petro-politics and urban artivism. She is currently developing her doctoral research into a monograph titled Culture as Renewable Oil. How Territory, Bureaucratic Power and Culture coalesce in the Venezuelan Petrostate. The book unpacks the entanglements between oil energy, state power, urban space and culture, by looking at the Petro-socialist Venezuelan oil state as an exemplar case study. It sets out to challenge the disciplinary compartmentalisation of the analysis of the material and cultural effects of oil to demonstrate that within the extractive logic of the Petrostate, territory, oil, and culture become indivisible.

• Charting Cultural Currents in Venezuela’s Pink TideLisa Blackmore, Rebecca Jarman, Penélope Plaza PrefaceGeorge Yúdice 1. Cultural Policies and the Bolivarian Revolution in the Socialist Venezuela of Hugo Chávez (1999-2013) Gisela Kozak-Rovero2. Hegemony in a Global Age: Mutations of the Communicational Spectacle in VenezuelaManuel Silva-Ferrer3. The Indian Within: Negotiating Indigenous Identity among Dominant Images of Indigeneity in Venezuela  Natalia García Bonet4. Oil’s Colonial Residues: Geopolitics, Identity, and Resistance in VenezuelaDonald V. Kingsbury5. Somatic Power in the Bolivarian Revolution: Biopolitics and Sacrifice in the Case of Franklin BritoPaula Vásquez6. Community, Heritage and the State: Rebuilding Armando Reverón’s El CastilleteDesiree Domec7. El Helicoide and La Torre de David as Phantom Pavilions: Rethinking Spectacles of Progress in VenezuelaLisa Blackmore8. Queering the Barrios? The Politics of Poverty and Sexuality in Mariana Rondón’s Film, Pelo malo (2013)Rebecca Jarman 9. Chronicles of Disenchantment: Rethinking ‘Venezuelanness’ in Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles’ Los DesterradosMaría Teresa Vera RojasBibliographyIndex