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

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 creation of post-oil societies is not simply a question of economics or technology; it is a cultural issue that requires engaging the artistic imagination. She calls for new ways of reading that re-situate Venezuelan cultural production within a planetary ecology of oil. With interdisciplinary reach across energy humanities, environmental studies, and Latin American cultural analysis, Failures of the Imagination challenges readers to confront the narrative infrastructures of extractivism and to imagine life beyond the logic of oil. Read more