Failures of the Imagination: Reckoning with Oil in Venezuelan Cultural Production

Despite the precariousness of an oil-based economy and the government’s professed concern about climate change, a failure of imagination regarding alternatives continues to trap Venezuela in an oil-fueled status quo. Elizabeth Barrios examines the ideologies that helped normalize oil production in Venezuela, which further made oil-led development appear to be the only path to prosperity. Anchored in analyses of literature and media from the 1930s to the 2000s, Barrios argues that the creati...