#YoTeCreo
A01=Irina R Troconis
Adriana Rondon-Rivero
Ana Alenso
Author_Irina R Troconis
CANTV
Category=JHMC
Cuartel de la Montana
Deborah Castillo
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
FANtasmo
ghost
haunting
Hugo Chavez
imagination
Jonas Romero Garcia
material culture
necromancy
Nicolas Maduro
performance
Simon Bolivar
specter
spectral remains
Violette Bule
Product details
- ISBN 9781478031079
- Weight: 476g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 25 Mar 2025
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In the spring of 2013, televisions across Venezuela announced the death of then-president Hugo ChÁvez, leader of the Bolivarian Revolution and key political actor in Latin America’s “turn to the left.” ChÁvez’s death, however, was not the end of ChÁvez’s life. In The Necromantic State, Irina R. Troconis examines how ChÁvez, as a “specter,” has lingered in Venezuela’s public, private, and digital spaces. Focusing on contemporary Venezuela and drawing from a diverse corpus that includes tattoos, toys, memes, graffiti, and a hologram haunting the streets of downtown Caracas, Troconis contends that, in moments of failed transitions, political tensions, and crises of legitimacy, the state brings the dead back to life to negotiate the terms of its survival. By showing how this necromantic performance enables the state’s material and visual manifestations in public and private spaces, Troconis untangles a sociopolitical moment in which the ghostly acts as the affective, social, and political force that grounds state authority and ensures the preservation of the status quo, as it circumscribes acts of political imagination and limits popular resistance.
Irina R. Troconis is Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies at Cornell University.
