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Book Chapter:
Más allá del ‘Estado mágico’: La recepción de Fernando Coronil en las humanidades ambientales
Este ensayo revisita The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (1997) de Fernando Coronil, obra fundamental para comprender la relación entre petróleo, cultura y poder en Venezuela, examinando su recepción en las humanidades ambientales contemporáneas. Coronil mostró cómo el Estado venezolano, mediador entre naturaleza y capital global, transformó los recursos del subsuelo en signos ilusorios de modernidad, generando una “magia” sustentada en la circulación de petrodólares más que en el desarrollo productivo. Su propuesta, articulada desde la antropología, el marxismo y los estudios postcoloniales, introdujo la noción de “sociedades exportadoras de naturaleza” y de una “división internacional de la naturaleza”, conceptos que han permitido complejizar la crítica del capitalismo global y sus regímenes extractivos. El artículo analiza cómo esta perspectiva ha influido en estudios sobre Venezuela, así como en trabajos comparativos sobre África, América Latina y el Caribe. También rastrea su impacto en el campo emergente de las humanidades energéticas (energy humanities), donde se reconoce a Coronil como un antecedente clave. Finalmente, se discute la vigencia de su obra en el actual contexto de crisis climática y extractivismos intensificados, señalando la necesidad de retomar su impulso desfetichizador para pensar alternativas culturales y políticas frente al agotamiento de la era del petróleo.
Paisajes del subsuelo: Mapas y pliegues de las culturas del petróleo en Venezuela en el siglo XX, edited by Manuel Silva-Ferrer. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2026.
Journal Article:
Unearthing Value: Visions of Gold in Contemporary Venezuelan Art
This article examines recent artistic projects that provide critical frameworks for reflecting on the relations between the geology of capitalism and the abstractions of exchange value, particularly in relation to gold mining. I concentrate on two Venezuelan artists whose works address the socio-ecological impacts of the Orinoco Mining Arc (Arco Minero del Orinoco), a controversial mining project in southern Venezuela. Esperanza Mayobre’s ongoing series of mixed-media installations, featuring gold-gilded cement bricks and drawings, critiques the abstractions of value while integrating Indigenous cosmologies of the Guiana region, where the Orinoco Mining Arc is located. Ana Alenso’s multimedia installation, which includes a machine-like sculpture replicating the tame or sluice used in artisanal gold mining, engages with the socio-technical mediations that underpin nature extraction. Responding to the need to study extraction ecologies from a cultural perspective, I contend that Mayobre and Alenso, in drawing from Amazonian Indigenous perspectives, provide insights into the value-centric ontology of capital and introduce alternative perspectives for envisioning the human-nature metabolism. In doing so, I underscore the crucial role of examining the geology of value as a central issue in understanding the Capitalocene.
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 34, no. 2, 2025.
Journal Article:
The Aesthetics of Geopower: Kinetic Art, the Guri Dam, and Environment-Making in Venezuela
I analyze the role of abstract kinetic art (or cinetismo) in the 1970s oil boom in Venezuela, focusing on the works made by Carlos Cruz-Diez and Alejandro Otero for the Guri hydroelectric dam. I argue that, at the peak of the large-scale environmental transformations of the oil bonanza, abstract kinetic art functioned as a cultural device of geopower, which refers to the articulation between science, culture, and power that enables the remaking of the earth. Contrasting the conventional view of kinetic art as an ideological front for the oil state, I show that it was an internal and active agent in the broader environmental project of Venezuelan modernization in two interrelated ways. First, by contributing to the collective understanding of nature (and not only petroleum) as a stock of resources to be “put to work” in the service of development. Secondly, through its direct involvement in a history of large-scale environment-making projects supported by nature extraction. My guiding assumption is that Venezuelan cinetismo can be understood as part of what Jason W. Moore calls capitalism’s “repertoire of strategies for appropriating the unpaid work/energy of humans and the rest of nature.” In this way, the case of cinetismo provides insights into how geopower relies not only on practices of techno-scientific visualization but equally on strategies of cultural production necessary to turn local ecologies into environments of “resources.” With this perspective, I aim to situate abstract kinetic art within the environmental history of Venezuelan modernization, while exposing the twofold nature, at once material and symbolic, of processes of ecological change.
Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group, vol. 36, no. 1, Spring 2024.
Book Review:
Sarah Quesada. The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 302 pp.
Sarah Quesada’s The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature offers an important shift in Latin American and Latinx literary studies by privileging understudied regions of the African archive. Moving away from Eurocentric and traditional narratives, the book seeks to reconfigure our understanding of established global frameworks—including the transnational, the cosmopolitan, and world literature—through a lens that distinctly emphasizes the Atlantic system’s impacts in Africa. In doing so, Quesada offers a fresh perspective on the intertwined legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and literature within the Latin America-Africa axis. … Continue Reading
African Studies Review 67, no. 3 (2024).
Book Review:
Stacey Balkan and Swaralipi Nandi, eds. Oil Fictions: World Literature and Our Contemporary Petrosphere. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State UP, 2021. 308 pp.
Recent studies about cultural representations of petroleum analyze how oil shapes the values, habits, and subjectivities of societies in the Global North. In particular, scholars in the energy humanities (an interdisciplinary field that studies the cultural, social, and political dimensions of energy) examine the cultural strategies that erase the negative impacts of petroleum while presenting fossil fuels as indispensable for modern life in the first world. Consequently, scholarly works about “petromodernity” and “petrocultures” often end up centering the experiences of those who benefit from oil, while leaving unattended how postcolonial societies are conditioned by large-scale hydrocarbon extraction. The recent volume Oil Fictions: World Literature and Our Contemporary Petrosphere, edited by Stacey Balkan and Swaralipi Nandi, corrects this gap, offering a necessary and long overdue critical intervention in the energy humanities from the perspective of the Global South. … Continue reading
Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, vol. 77, no. 1, Jan. 2023.
Journal Article:
Una economía mayamera: petróleo, gasto y consumo en el ocaso de la “Venezuela saudita”
In this article I study the cultural logic of expenditure through a reading of the documentary Mayami nuestro (1981) by Carlos Oteyza. I argue that the film—countering the standard criticism of the consumerist boom of the seventies and eighties during the Venezuelan oil bonanza—articulates the social productivity of squandering as a form of participation in the country’s natural wealth (petroleum) metabolized into money. Following Fernando Coronil, I understand the nexus between oil, politics, and democracy in Venezuela as an effect of a national agreement according to which national belonging (and the very idea of democracy) depended on the collective ownership of the subsoil. Georges Bataille’s notion of expenditure allows me to illuminate the ways in which the Venezuelan middle class challenged the boundaries imposed by social ranks and the geopolitical subordination of the “third world”. Lastly, I understand oil-money as a force in the production of a global space that is always unstable and subject to the risks and fluctuations of the capitalist ecology. In the last section I unveil how Mayami nuestro alerts about the dangers of unsustainable dreams and the illusions of oil.
Estudios de Teoría Literaria, vol. 10, no. 21, March 2021.
Essay:
El Capitaloceno y la ecología de la cultura
La crisis ecológica del presente ha transformado las maneras de estudiar el papel jugado por la cultura en las relaciones entre la sociedad y la naturaleza. El campo interdisciplinario de las «humanidades ambientales» se ha expandido con rapidez para aglomerar aquellos esfuerzos que, al menos desde el auge de la ecocrítica en los años noventa, han estudiado la literatura, la cultura popular y las artes visuales con la misma preocupación central por los fenómenos socioecológicos. Ante la variedad de enfoques, debates y alternativas que se han originado durante este verdadero «giro» ambiental, vale detenerse a examinar algunas reflexiones provenientes del eco-marxismo, la historia ambiental y los estudios culturales que entienden la crisis ecológica del presente como resultado directo del sistema capitalista.
Reporte Sexto Piso, March, 2021.
Essay:
La cabellera negra de Emira Rodríguez
El sol de Pampatar recalentaba las aceras de la urbanización Jorge Coll. Llamé a la puerta esperando, ingenuamente, que me recibiera la figura esbelta y de larga cabellera oscura que me había descrito De-Sola. En cambio, quien abrió me llegaba por debajo de los hombros y arrastraba penosamente una andadera. La cabellera gris, la voz aguda y quejumbrosa. Durante nuestra conversación pude darme cuenta, sin embargo, de que toda esa esbeltez, toda esa firmeza, reposaba aún intacta en su carácter y en su mirada. Supuse que, en el fondo, poco había cambiado.
Letra Muerta, July 19, 2017.
Journal Article:
Posthegemonía y postsubalternidad: Desencuentros del latinoamericanismo frente a la ‘marea rosada’
In this article I contrast the posthegemonic theory of Jon Beasley-Murray and John Beverley’s idea of postsubalternity. I study the authors’ stances on the problems of the state and the nation vis-à-vis the claims made by Latin American Indigenous and social movements, which became entangled with the structures of the state in the context of the so-called “pink tide.” I do not lose track of the specificity of the Venezuelan context, since it seems to work as a limit case for the theoretical premises of both posthegemony and postsubalternity. With this article I won the 2016 Ángel del Río prize in the category of essay, awarded by the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University.
Cuadernos de Literatura, vol. XX, no. 39, 2016.
Essay:
Vilas sabe lo que hace, o la poesía como crítica de la ideología
La obra poética de Manuel Vilas (Barbastro, Huesca, 1962) confronta un problema que ha ocupado durante años a algunos sectores de la teoría y de la crítica de arte, así como a gran parte de los estudios culturales: la dificultad de descubrir —y de producir— dentro del terreno de la cultura masiva la posibilidad de un arte cargado de alguna potencialidad política emancipadora. Pero, ¿cómo debemos entender al poeta cuando dice que McDonald’s “es un restaurante comunista” o que “ha hecho más por la erradicación del hambre en el mundo / que toda Europa junta”? ¿Qué puede haber detrás de enunciados como: “Todo cuanto viene de los hombres, la guerra, la enfermedad, la ciencia, el amor, la historia, los cosméticos, los bañadores, yo lo amo”? En el fondo, todas nuestras dudas y desaciertos al momento de leer a Vilas se relacionan con una misma interrogante: ¿cómo leer la poesía?, ¿cómo tomárnosla absolutamente en serio?
Prologue to Antología poética by Manuel Vilas, Barco de Piedra, 2015.
Journal Article:
Los poetas del desvarío: Tensiones entre sentido y rostridad en la poesía venezolana del siglo XX
This article examines the relationship between canonicity and hermeneutics by engaging with an archive of marginal Venezuelan poets whose works challenge standard models of poetic meaning-making. First, I propose that literary criticism functions as a faciality machine (Deleuze and Guattari) whose task is to produce a readable and recognizable canon closely identified with national values. In this way, I argue, interpretability, canonicity, and nation are closely related. Then, I show that the “poetics of desvarío” (how I call my corpus of “unreadable” texts) remains outside the canon—and is, in fact, uncanonizable—precisely because it destabilizes the long-standing relationship between hermeneutics, nation-building, and meaning-making. The article derives from the master’s thesis I wrote for the M. Sc. in Venezuelan Literature at Universidad Central de Venezuela in 2010.
Investigaciones Literarias, vol. I-II, no. 18, 2010.