The Politics of Culture in the Chávez Era
Bulletin of Latin American Research Book Series
1. Edition August 2019
216 Pages, Softcover
Wiley & Sons Ltd
Short Description
This volume maps the trends in cultural policies and political cultures that accompanied Chávez's four presidential terms (1999-2013) in twenty-first century Venezuela. The chapters develop original close readings of varied cultural activities, including political protest, urban culture, and grassroots heritage projects, alongside conventional aesthetic manifestations such as film and literature.
This volume maps the trends in cultural policies and political cultures that accompanied Chávez's four presidential terms (1999-2013) in twenty-first century Venezuela.
* Assesses the manifold impacts that the politics of chavismo had on the cultural sphere
* Maps key shifts and trends in cultural policies and political cultures that accompanied Chávez's four presidential terms, situating these in the regional context of "Pink Tide" politics
* An ambitious, interdisciplinary volume offering a range of perspectives, from broad overviews of cultural and media policy, to close readings of varied aesthetic manifestations
* Encompasses conventional cultural products, such as recent film and literature, as well as engagements with cultural imaginaries that play out in political protest, urban culture, and grassroots heritage projects
* Examines how individual and collective imaginaries were negotiated and formed within, alongside or against the state with the advancement of the Bolivarian Revolution
Lisa Blackmore, Rebecca Jarman, Penélope Plaza
Preface
George Yúdice
1. Cultural Policies and the Bolivarian Revolution in the Socialist Venezuela of Hugo Chávez (1999-2013)
Gisela Kozak-Rovero
2. Hegemony in a Global Age: Mutations of the Communicational Spectacle in Venezuela
Manuel Silva-Ferrer
3. The Indian Within: Negotiating Indigenous Identity among Dominant Images of Indigeneity in Venezuela
Natalia García Bonet
4. Oil's Colonial Residues: Geopolitics, Identity, and Resistance in Venezuela
Donald V. Kingsbury
5. Somatic Power in the Bolivarian Revolution: Biopolitics and Sacrifice in the Case of Franklin Brito
Paula Vásquez
6. Community, Heritage and the State: Rebuilding Armando Reverón's El Castillete
Desiree Domec
7. El Helicoide and La Torre de David as Phantom Pavilions: Rethinking Spectacles of Progress in Venezuela
Lisa Blackmore
8. 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 Desterrados
María Teresa Vera Rojas
Bibliography
Index
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.
