Oil's Colonial Residues: Geopolitics, Identity, and Resistance in Venezuela

This article argues oil occupies a central role in the discursive universe of Venezuelan underdevelopment, producing anxieties of vulnerability and dependency. These anxieties are internalised and reproduced in what I describe as the coloniality of oil. Coloniality naturalises, hides, and rewrites m...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Bulletin of Latin American Research
Main Author: KINGSBURY, DONALD V.
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Wiley 2016
Subjects:
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/blar.12477
https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1111%2Fblar.12477
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/blar.12477
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Summary:This article argues oil occupies a central role in the discursive universe of Venezuelan underdevelopment, producing anxieties of vulnerability and dependency. These anxieties are internalised and reproduced in what I describe as the coloniality of oil. Coloniality naturalises, hides, and rewrites maldevelopment – a process in which the developed world stymies growth elsewhere through the machinations of hard or soft power – as underdevelopment – a neutral category suggesting the developing world need only to catch up to the North Atlantic. Animated by the formation of new political subjectivities, the Bolivarian Revolution has attempted to break with this coloniality of oil.