Invisible Geographies: Oil, Time, and Ecology in Venezuelan Cultural Production.

Abstract

Despite its political and economic significance in Venezuela, cultural critics have often argued that oil has remained absent in the country’s cultural production. Invisible Geographies disputes the idea of oil’s cultural absence in Venezuela. It does so, in part, by engaging with a wide range of overlooked texts, which deal with oil’s social, material and ecological impact. The project’s chief aim, however, is to challenge the conceptual practices that have rendered oil invisible in the Venezuelan cultural imaginary—in particular, the conventional modes of conceptualizing the nation’s territory and history. Through analyses of regionalist literature, early twentieth-century poetry, state documents, and oil industry propaganda, the project first shows how representations of nature as a timeless realm at the margins of human history, have been deployed to veil oil’s ecological imprint. A reading of the overlooked subgenre of la novela del petróleo delves into how sites of extraction and their literary representations have been exiled to a “no place” (a term famously used by Amitav Ghosh’s) imagined to exist outside the proper bounds of the nation. When reinserted into visions of the Venezuelan nation, these sites of extraction unsettle the usual ways of periodizing political change. The effects of oil’s invisibility in urban life and consumer culture are explored in relation to the literary work of Arturo Uslar Pietri, as well as the films produced by the Shell Oil Film Unit. Of particular interest in this portion of the project is the extent to which mid twentieth-century urban growth in Venezuela as well as in much of the world implicitly depended on the oil industry’s promise to liberate modern societies from the material and temporal limits. The project closes by examining the unwillingness to contend with long-term ecological harm as a political problem by delving into the controversy unleashed by the documentary Nuestro petróleo y otros cuentos (2005). As a whole, Invisible Geographies argues that the global ecological crises of the twenty-first century require a reexamination of the spatial and temporal categories that have been central to the idea of the modern nation.