Politics of Culture in the Chávez Era

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 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.