Bolivarian Revolution Research Articles (Page 1)

The purpose of this paper is to identify some of the new economic challenges faced by left-wing forces in Latin America, especially in countries endowed with natural resources. We propose a set of progressive policy responses to prevent the regional Left from repeating the missteps of the policy agenda followed by the so-called Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. We highlight the need to build an alternative based on what we call “progressive democratic development.” Our fundamental message is that the democratic Left has to overcome the misleading dichotomy that indicates that society is organized by the power of the state or the market. Instead prominence must be given to civil society. Several ideas are raised about how to work on the behalf of and lend prominence to civil society and the poorest segment of the population, particularly in the context of natural resource rich economies. The essay explores new formulas to manage mining and oil wealth, provide a social protection system to the growing informal sector, and to manage macroeconomic policy in a socially responsible manner.

The Politicization of the Venezuelan Supreme Tribunal during the Bolivarian Revolution: An Empirical Analysis (2000-2009)

The year 2024 marks 25 years since ‘Chavismo’ took office in Venezuela. Commencing with Hugo Chávez in 1999, and continuing with Nicolás Maduro (2013–), the Bolivarian revolution has challenged local and foreign elites by retaking control of the country’s oil industry, rejected US hegemony, and promoted greater political and economic independence through the integration of Latin America and the Caribbean. While Chávez and Maduro’s populist rhetoric has been evident during both presidencies, both leaders have differed in the effectiveness of their speeches and media presence. Also, while Venezuela’s push for regional integration has continued in recent years despite serious setbacks to such projects as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – People’s Trade Treaty (ALBA–TCP), Petrocaribe, the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), the effectiveness of Caracas’ foreign policy has diminished under Maduro due to the impact of US economic sanctions, a decline in global oil prices from 2014 onwards and changing administrations in Brasilia from the progressive presidencies of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Vana Rousseff (2003–16) to the hard-right governments of Michel Temer and Jair Bolsonaro (2016–23). Analysing these developments and the rift between Caracas and Brasilia over the 2024 presidential election result in Venezuela, this article will explore some of the trajectories of Caracas’ foreign policy towards the promotion of regionalism in the Americas while seeking to contrast some of the successes and failures between the Chávez and Maduro administrations.

Among the pantheon of left-wing Latin American governments that swept the continent in the early 21st century, arguably the most radical, most beguiling, most contradictory, and most tragic, is the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. Given its unique (though not necessarily ‘special’) place within this political conjuncture, no shortage of ink has been spilled on the deep-seated transformations carried out in the name of the Venezuelan people, as well as the domestic and international conflicts that followed in their wake (see, most recently, Marino 2018; Samet 2019; Cooper 2019; Wilde 2023; Lubbock 2024). Among the many themes examined by scholars, activists and other observers is the role of higher education reform within the Bolivarian Republic, and the ways in which Hugo Chávez Frias, the charismatic leader of the ‘Bolivarian turn’, sought to build a new society by cultivating new knowledge among the people.

This article analyzes cultural production in theaters across three pivotal historical moments from the 1980s to the present, including the theater as ruins, refuge, and resistance. It begins with the theater in ruins as depicted in the 1986 film, The Black Sheep, by the legendary playwright, director, and filmmaker, Román Chalbaud, in which a commune of artists, outcasts, and misfits squat in the theater, taking shelter from a storm of state-sponsored neoliberal austerity, corruption, and persecution in the pre-Chávez era of Venezuela. The article then turns to the work of community groups during Chávez-led revolutionary reforms to recuperate abandoned theaters as vital spaces for democratic assembly through municipal government programs. The last section of the article juxtaposes the advanced democratization of theaters and cultural production in Caracas during the Maduro era with a phase of violent street mobilizations in middle-class and wealthy sectors of the city (known as guarimbas), to raise questions about the role of the media as an intervening character in global theaters of illusion. Where the spotlight shifts in location from stages to streets, and the street to the screen, the actual conditions of democratized access are happening behind the unlit marquis, a global majority operating in an ‘underground’ commune in the same scenario as the film. Except in this case, the military-media arm of the US polices the ‘streets’ of the global media commons to malign the Bolivarian Revolution as a black sheep political project. The conclusion points to the media’s role in promoting a dangerous misperception of reality by erasing the constituent power of a revolutionary society and the perpetuation of violence against them.

La propuesta constituye el aporte que le fue perfilando al Sistema Educativo Bolivariano en el que hacer formativo con una educación que integra al sujeto en la comunidad, que considera a la naturaleza como un componente inseparable del sujeto, que evita las diferencias y las rivalidades con la naturaleza. La morfología como el común de muchas disciplinas, en su recorrido desde las ciencias naturales, definida particularmente desde distintos puntos de vista, cuya aparición en las ciencias naturales fue fundamental, pasando desde allí a las ciencias humanas donde fue adquiriendo características en sus expresiones como morfología cultural o morfología social. Concretando un estudio que se presenta con variantes en las formas cuya composición se vuelve estructurante de la Universidad Nacional Experimental del Magisterio, al Nuevo Socialismo como la condición histórica que introduce al Proceso de Revolución Bolivariana a objeto de que todos, en base a los preceptos constitucionales de participación protagónica, asumamos la corresponsabilidad para crear conocimiento, considerándolo poder de pueblo, y sobre la base de generación de teoría dar fundamento a los hechos que la praxis revolucionaria ha creado para su disfrute así como la transformación de los procesos territoriales asociados al desarrollo morfológico así como a sus características sociales con criterio político y educativo. Así como la dialéctica en el crecimiento de la sociedad desde adentro con mirada sostenida en su originalidad, en sus diversos sistemas culturales. Con una interrogante muy particulares en lo que ha dado forma desde su comienzo con la Educación Bolivariana en el diseño Curricular.

La Revolución Bolivariana es el proceso político iniciado en Venezuela a finales del siglo XX por Hugo Chávez y perpetuado en el siglo XXI por Nicolás Maduro. Por originalidad, longevidad, impacto interno e influencia exterior, es uno de los proyectos refundacionales más relevantes de la izquierda revolucionaria iberoamericana tras finalizar la Guerra Fría. Sus múltiples rasgos han propiciado diversas caracterizaciones desde la ciencia política. Se ofrece aquí una aproximación general al respecto, mediante una periodización que permite apreciar la evolución en el tiempo del movimiento y régimen chavista; una breve exposición del socialismo bolivariano como propuesta retórico-ideológica; una descripción sucinta del giro desarrollado en política exterior por parte del gobierno venezolano tras asumir la condición de estado revolucionario; y una caracterización general del chavismo-madurismo como movimiento y régimen político, concluyendo que sus rasgos y tendencias totalitarias son las que mejor definen su naturaleza en términos globales.

This article deploys neo-Gramscian international relations theory to discuss how the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America (ALBA) can be understood as an attempted transnationalisation of the counter-hegemonic historical bloc of social forces that originated with Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution. The Bolivarian Revolution inaugurated a protagonistic National Constitution which sought to give a central role to civil society and social movements in political life, enfranchising unrepresented people, like indigenous communities. ALBA consists of an attempt to transnationalise this movement by providing a model of regionalization for Latin America that constitutes an alternative to the neoliberal approach embodied in other regionalisation initiatives, such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). However, the article argues that ALBA's success as a vehicle for the transnationalisation of counter-hegemony in Latin America has been severely compromised by emerging tensions and contradictions within the Bolivarian Revolution historical bloc, namely between the social movements and the central governments of ALBA's member countries. These contradictions become particularly evident when analysing social movements' struggles about the environmental impacts of massive infrastructure projects promoted by these governments as part of their overall national and regional strategy of economic development and poverty alleviation.

Abstract: There are strong continuities between crowd theory, which flowered during the early twentieth century, and theories of populist mobilization. Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power (1960) bridges these two literatures. Canetti gives us two relatively underappreciated ideas—the sting of command and the impulse for survival—that explain how populist movements change over time. To demonstrate how Canetti's work speaks to theories of populism, I draw on my fieldwork in Caracas, Venezuela. Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution was, arguably, the most progressive political movement of the twenty-first century, but it veered wildly off course. Crowd theory gives us tools to track this transformation. Rather than imagining that populist movements are vacuous from the outset, Canetti directs attention toward their animating grievances. This article considers how the grievances that fed the Bolivarian Revolution eventually consumed it; this is a modest attempt to understand how one of the most promising political movements in recent memory ended up such a long way from where it started.

ABSTRACT This article presents a decolonial feminist geopolitics of Venezuelan migration to Colombia, with Venezuelans fleeing the socialist Bolivarian Revolution and then facing discrimination and violence upon settling in capitalist Colombia amid its failing peace process context. Conflicts over migration and nationality permeate our global order of sovereign nation-states, both in north-south migrations and across the global south, while the feminisation and racialisation of migrants divides the subaltern class and facilitates capitalist exploitation. However, this paper elucidates migrants’ inter-national solidarities and grassroots peace struggles. Community organisers along the Colombia-Venezuela border – the women’s empowerment organisation Tejedores de Paz and youth leadership foundation Horizonte de Juventud – unite impoverished internally-displaced Colombians and Venezuelan immigrants to create resistance territories against xenophobia, patriarchy, and poverty. Illustrating the utility of the methodology of decolonial feminist geopolitics, I trace the reconfiguration of the spirit of sociopolitical revolution in South America through migrants’ emergent form of feminist non-state socialism.

Populism is a notoriously unstable phenomenon. This instability has been on full display in contemporary Latin America where the progressive gains of the Pink Tide have confronted a rightwing backlash. How do we understand the sudden shift of fortunes from left to right? What tilted the balance of power in the region? One familiar answer to these questions is the exploitation by rightwing actors of tough-on-crime or mano dura rhetoric, which scapegoats already vulnerable populations (minorities, the poor, the “deviant,” etc.) as the source of insecurity. In conversation with this collection of papers on revanchist populism in Brazil, I want to propose a subtle twist on the theme of security and its role in rightwing populist mobilization. It draws on my research in neighboring Venezuela. Specifically, it looks at the unraveling of the Bolivarian Revolution’s progressive promise to defend the urban popular sectors against death squads, torture, arbitrary detention and other oppressive forms of policing. Comparing Venezuela, the vanguard of Latin America’s left turn, to Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil may seem scandalous at first blush, but doing so asks us to confront an inconvenient truth about what I call the will to security. Rather than imagining security as something imposed from above, the will to security reframes it as an articulation of demands that resonate, at least in part, with the popular sectors. Adding this perspective to our analysis of rightwing populism provides an alternative spatial paradigm to the conversations about security that lends it historical depth and policy relevant positioning.

With the decline of the Bolivarian Revolution, Venezuela has become synonymous with catastrophe, yet contemporary Venezuelan cinema has received unprecedented international recognition and spectatorship. How Venezuelan film prospered in such circumstances? How can recent Venezuelan productions be regarded as a cohesive, collective movement, namely New Venezuelan Cinema? In what ways has this been marked by crisis? This article addresses these questions, offering an overview of the cinematic infrastructure in Bolivarian Venezuela, before proceeding to analyse Desde allá (Lorenzo Vigas, 2015) and La familia (Gustavo Rondón, 2016) as films that inquire into, and are marked by, the Venezuelan crisis.

Abstract This article analyzes the political dynamics involved in the inclusion of the Mapoyo oral tradition into UNESCO's lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage. We frame this designation as an “event” that encapsulates a contested process of negotiation between the Mapoyo Indigenous community and the Venezuelan state. Our article evaluates the intersection of two asymmetrical (but nonantagonistic) political agendas in terms of how they are enacted through heritage‐making practices: (1) the Mapoyo's demands for territorial autonomy and (2) the Bolivarian Revolution's nationalist program. We focus on the way this heritagization process was tied to discourses of patriotic indigeneity centered on a sword attributed to Simón Bolívar. We argue that even though heritage‐making practices mostly reproduce nation states’ hegemonic discourses, they can also open spaces for subaltern groups to exert relational forms of agency. Ultimately, we show the implications of the Mapoyo heritage designation in reimagining the place of Indigenous peoples in Venezuela's national history.

A lo largo del proceso de la Revolución Bolivariana, se han desarrollado en Venezuela fuertes contradicciones de clase y del sistema alimentario, que han enfrentado las fuerzas de una cultura de consumo que favorece los alimentos importados, el modelo de la revolución verde, y el uso intensivo de insumos, a otro modelo que representa la ruta hacia la soberanía alimentaria y un paradigma agroecológico emergente impulsado por los movimientos de base. Como producto del proceso revolucionario, en 2004 se fundó en la Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela, el Programa de Formación de Grado en Agroecología (PFG) con el fin de ampliar las prácticas y conocimientos agroecológicos con base en enfoques pedagógicos alternativos. En la pasada década, más de mil graduados del PFG han ocupado espacios institucionales y proyectos productivos en áreas urbanas y rurales, contribuyendo así a la escala agroecológica vertical y horizontal, lo que muestra su papel clave en este creciente movimiento y su capacidad de crear mediadores para territorializar la agroecología e institucionalizar la política pro campesina en Venezuela. Como dato político atípico, este país es un caso importante para el estudio de las estrategias de territorialización de la agroecología socialmente comprometida y situada.

This work desribe Chavismo as a populist movement and in making Venezuelan foreign policy directed towards the United States in the six years from 2013-2019. By using the Foreign Policy Theory which explains the function and purpose of foreign policy, it is found that Chavismo does not have much influence in making foreign policy towards the United States. The death of Hugo Chávez plus the poor economic conditions in the Maduro era, inevitably the problem of existence now plagues Chavismo. Chavismo under the government of Nicholás Maduro is in an alarming position. Where the position of this socialist movement no longer occupies a significant number as when Chávez, was still alive. The study of Chavismo in foreign policy is still possible given that Nicholás Maduro is a Chavista. Nicholás Maduro also carries out foreign policy with Chávez,s foreign policy. Sticking to the existing foreign policy, there is not much Maduro can do to maintain his power and the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela

The article examines the features of historical development of Venezuela since the proclamation of the country’s independence at the beginning of the 19th century up to the modern period of governing by the Venezuelan presidents Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro. The article pays a special attention to an important event in the history of Venezuela - the 1914 discovery of a giant oil field in the region of Maracaibo Lake, Venezuela’s implementation and further development of the so-called oil-containing model and the impact of the oil and gas production and processing of carbon resources on the socio-political situation in the country and well-being of the Venezuelan people. The period of the reign of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (1998-2013) has been studied in more detail. The general thesis of the doctrine of the “Bolivarian revolution” have been considered and certain provisions end attainments of the program to construct the “Bolivarian socialism”, have been detected certain achievements and problems of implementing the participatory democracy in Venezuela. Certain foreign policy initiatives of the president and specific steps aimed at achieving the leading role in the region of Latin America and the Caribbean have been analyzed. The article highlights anti-Americanism as a peculiar trend of Hugo Chavez’s foreign policy and the sentiments of Venezuelan society, the peculiarities of Venezuela-Ukraine bilateral relations development have been emphasized. It has been concluded that it is advisable to further study the experience of creating the state and carrying out reforms in Venezuela for its possible further use in the development of our state, as well as using certain Venezuelan approaches regarding its leadership in the region of Latin America and the Caribbean in order to enhance and strengthen the role of Ukraine in the European regional cooperation.

Reviewed by: Writing and the Revolution: Venezuelan Metafiction 2004-2012 by Katie Brown Irina R. Troconis Brown, Katie. Writing and the Revolution: Venezuelan Metafiction 2004-2012. Liverpool UP, 2019. 198 pp. Katie Brown's Writing and the Revolution: Venezuelan Metafiction 2004-2012 is an illuminating and welcome addition to a growing corpus that examines cultural production during the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. Focusing on contemporary Venezuelan fiction, Brown addresses and productively challenges its absence not only from English language scholarship, but also from debates and discussions—old and new—that have shaped and defined the scope and the study of Latin American literature. Brown's study focuses on eight novels published between 2004 and 2012: Juan Carlos Chirinos's El niño malo cuenta hasta cien y se retira (2004), Slavko Zupcic's Círculo croata (2006), Israel Centeno's Bajo las hojas (2010), Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez's Chulapos Mambo (2011), Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles's Transilvania unplugged (2011), Alberto Barrera Tyszka's Rating (2011), Gisela Kozak Rovero's Todas las lunas (2011), and Armando Luigi Castañeda's La fama, o es venérea, o no es fama (2012). The year 2004, as Brown points out, marks the start of major attention to culture in Bolivarian policy, while 2012 was the final full year of Hugo Chávez's life. Within this temporal framework, a question that dominated cultural and political debates in Venezuela and that figures prominently in the novels analyzed is: what is the role of literature? More specifically: who should have access to it? Who should be considered a writer? Whose stories should be told, and how? How should literature engage with national concerns and global demands? Brown's analysis explores not only how the writers of the aforementioned novels position themselves vis-à-vis these questions, but also how the cultural apparatus of the Bolivarian Revolution led by Minister for Culture Francisco Sesto established a strong link between the production of culture and the political project of re-founding the Venezuelan nation. Faced with the Bolivarian idea of culture "in which politics is the utmost priority" (15), the writers Brown engages with turn to metafiction, intertextuality, and autofiction to escape from the oppression of official grand narratives and to explore different forms of national belonging and different understandings of what it means to write literature in and about Venezuela. Brown's extensive introduction addresses several elements of the literary and political context framing the novels discussed in the book's six chapters, beginning with an overview of the various factors that contributed to the absence of Venezuelan writing from world literary spaces and from defining literary movements such as the Boom. This absence, Brown argues, problematizes recent theories of "global" or "post-national" Latin American literature "which are based on studies of a handful of countries" and which conceptualize it as not particularly exceptionalist or isolationist (2). Though contemporary Venezuelan literature shares many of the characteristics of "global" or "post-national" literature, it also draws attention to the insistence of the Bolivarian government that "the national is necessary and [End Page 467] sufficient" and that literature should not be influenced by the foreign (5). Brown traces the development of this understanding of literature by examining the different cultural policies that were introduced starting in 2004, and that promoted "nationalism, socialism, the democratisation of literature, and a focus on literature as a way of documenting and transferring information more than as a creative endeavor" (13). She then discusses how Venezuelan writers reacted to these changes in the cultural landscape, the challenges they faced in terms of publishing inside and outside of the state system, and the changes in the visibility and marketability of Venezuelan literature that have resulted from the ongoing wave of emigration caused by the Bolivarian Revolution. She concludes with an overview of each of the novels and authors examined in each chapter, and develops a conceptual framework to approach their shared interest in experimenting with metafiction, autofiction, and intertextuality. Brown's introduction not only provides readers with a thorough analysis of the state of the literary industry in Venezuela under the Bolivarian Revolution, but it also places it in a productive...

 Reviews spaces. e watershed election of Hugo Chávez in —which serves as Schiller’s point of departure—initiated the process known as the Bolivarian Revolution, creating new opportunities for grass-roots media. A suite of constitutional reforms provided the legal and infrastructural frameworks that allowed for the formalization of CatiaTVe. e community channel, like dozens across the nation, acquired permission to broadcast on the television network. In many respects, the Manicomio Film Club anticipated the Bolivarian tenor of local autonomy, although it received more governmental funding once CatiaTVe expanded its operations. Did this new proximity between state and people entail the co-optation of grass-roots labour? No, is Schiller’s unwavering answer, because the state is neither ‘a coherent thing to be seized’ (p. ) nor a ‘collection of institutions always already predisposed to enacting a particular kind of politics’ (p. ), but, instead, the ‘ever-unfolding result of daily power-laden interactions between poor and elite social actors’ (p. ). Participating in debates over agency, power, and representation in the Bolivarian Revolution, she argues that the creators of CatiaTVe ‘experienced, understood, and created the state through the process of making media’ (p. ). us Channeling the State rehearses its argument not by analysing content or ratings. Rather, Schiller claims, much along the lines of New Latin American Cinema, it is the creation of new world-views, and all the messiness that this entails, that engenders revolutionary praxis. e result is a fascinating behind-the-scenes account that draws on months of ethnographic fieldwork. We are offered intimate access to workshops, production sets, editorial meetings, press conferences, and on-location shootings. e author is sympathetic to the core values of CatiaTVe and, by extension, to the egalitarian drive that for some underpinned the Bolivarian Revolution. It is much to her credit, then, that her analysis foregrounds tensions within the collective and carefully examines contradictions in their strategies. e book’s framing of CatiaTVe as a legacy of New Latin American Cinema makes it an essential reference for researchers of film and participatory film-making. e mediascape in Venezuela has seen a dramatic decline in diversity since the research was conducted. As such, Channeling the State also constitutes an important, if lamentable, historical artefact. U  L R J Poetica: Schrien zur Literatur, Übersetzungen und Gedichte. By G S. Ed. by H K-O, H M, M-  T, and S W in collaboration with T H. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag. .  pp. € ISBN – –––. is magnificent collection contains a cornucopia of texts by the doyen of twentiethcentury Jewish Studies, who was also a master of German literature. It collects essays, translations, reviews, poems, and letters; and its subjects range from the Song of Songs to the Book of Job, from the Talmud to the Zohar, and from Bialek MLR, .,   and Agnon to Martin Buber. Indeed, this volume places Scholem on a par with the finest German Jewish thinkers, alongside Moses Mendelssohn and Hermann Cohen, inasmuch as he raises his philological commentary to the level of philosophy . e essays illuminate topics such as translation, the Talmudic style, Aramaic, or the nature of language with its ‘heavenly alphabet’. Scholem’s insights into areas far beyond his specialism such as the Halakhah and the Aggadah are as incisive as they are definitive. roughout we follow a scintillating intelligence in pursuit of truth. e dialogue between religion and politics which sustains Scholem’s endeavours is manifest from the start, as he enters the polemical fray: whether taking issue with Buber or performing a hatchet job on Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, he battles against mediocrity and cant with the ferocity of a prophet. When his contemporaries were celebrating the First World War, he assailed the hostilities in a poem that attacks the ‘Mythos der Völkermord’. Yet he can be conciliatory, too, as in his poem to Ingeborg Bachmann with its typical scepticism: ‘Die Stunde der Erlösung ist vorüber’. In ditching Messianism he had the courage to discard one of the central tenets of Judaism. Ironically, nothing better shows the depth and intensity of the German–Jewish symbiosis, the existence of which he denied, than Scholem’s commentary on Luther...

MLR, .,   Transilvania Unplugged) both individually and collectively explore the existential tensions produced by prescriptive notions of national identity by asserting the complexity of individual experiences of affect and belonging (p. ). is monograph is a timely and significant contribution to understanding the effect of Bolivarian cultural policy, and its inherent contradictions, on the ‘minor’ contemporary literature produced by Venezuelans (p. ), both within the country and in exile. More broadly, it will appeal to scholars and students interested in the tensions between national cultural policies, publishing, and experimental literature. U  R P P Channeling the State: Community Media and Popular Politics in Venezuela. By N S. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. . xiv+ pp. $.. ISBN ––––. How does a DIY film club become a television station? is is one of the questions behind Channeling the State, a book that investigates the workings of CatiaTVe, a government-sponsored, community-led broadcaster that, since , has operated from Caracas. In its prime the channel aired eighteen hours a day. Seventy per cent of content was created by residents of Catia, a low-income district of the capital. Schiller traces the station’s origins to . Its directors began as a group of students and activists who established a community film club in the neighbourhood of Manicomio. With government funding, they bought a  mm film projector and hung a makeshi screen from the raers of an open-air sports centre. ey invited the people of Catia to watch the revolutionary missives of the s, when anti-capitalist Latin American film-makers resolved to use their chosen media to promote social change, and to challenge the hegemony of Hollywood. Perhaps frustrated by low turnouts, the Manicomio Film Club soon purchased a VHS player and built a collection of pirate videos. ese included action blockbusters and Disney animations, giving showtime to the man who, quite literally, gave a friendly face to aggressive free-market policies and who suppressed unionization among his cartoonists. e organizers, we are informed, were aware of such contradictions . ey counteracted a desire to attract larger audiences with discussions that deconstructed these commercial features. Schiller’s opening with a brief history of the Cine Club confirms that the s was an exciting, if challenging, time for film-makers in Venezuela. Although the country spent most of the decade reeling from an economic crisis, it would also eventually, in , see the creation of a National Film Commission (CNAC). Many of CNAC’s directors and associates had graduated from the school of New Latin American Cinema, which in  held a keystone festival in the Venezuelan city of Mérida. Following the principles of revolutionary film, the CNAC sought to engage with the popular urban sectors and, around the time of its inauguration, premiered feature films in Catia. In  the Manicomio Film Club acquired a hand-held camera and began making local-interest newsreels that were screened in public  Reviews spaces. e watershed election of Hugo Chávez in —which serves as Schiller’s point of departure—initiated the process known as the Bolivarian Revolution, creating new opportunities for grass-roots media. A suite of constitutional reforms provided the legal and infrastructural frameworks that allowed for the formalization of CatiaTVe. e community channel, like dozens across the nation, acquired permission to broadcast on the television network. In many respects, the Manicomio Film Club anticipated the Bolivarian tenor of local autonomy, although it received more governmental funding once CatiaTVe expanded its operations. Did this new proximity between state and people entail the co-optation of grass-roots labour? No, is Schiller’s unwavering answer, because the state is neither ‘a coherent thing to be seized’ (p. ) nor a ‘collection of institutions always already predisposed to enacting a particular kind of politics’ (p. ), but, instead, the ‘ever-unfolding result of daily power-laden interactions between poor and elite social actors’ (p. ). Participating in debates over agency, power, and representation in the Bolivarian Revolution, she argues that the creators of CatiaTVe ‘experienced, understood, and created the state through the process of making media’ (p. ). us Channeling the State rehearses its argument not by analysing content or ratings. Rather, Schiller claims, much along the lines of New Latin American Cinema...

MLR, .,   Spain. Chapters  and  are, in my opinion, the most interesting as they focus on the writers’ public personas and responses to the issue of women’s writing. ese chapters chronicle the development of female authors, from a cautious Matute to an ambivalent Montero, and finally to the explicitly feminist Etxebarría. Oaknín’s examination of women’s writing and its publication leads to questions concerning marketing and critical reception. ese issues are addressed with the input of the critics Christine Henseler and Laura Freixas. Both Henseler and Freixas criticize the influence of the publishing industry on female writers who, it is argued, have faced gender-specific obstacles while attempting to represent themselves publicly. Oaknín provides strong evidence of gender bias in the promotion and reception of women’s writing in Spain and examines how such bias affects the construction of their public personas. In relation to discriminatory marketing strategies, she argues convincingly that ‘although there is a widespread perception that Western women writers are now living in a post-feminist era of unprecedented opportunities, the traditional sexist stereotypes not only persist, but recur’ (p. ). Oaknín’s study is further characterized by a valuable contextualization of discourses around the legitimacy of the idea of ‘women’s writing’ in present times, when the concepts of women/men and sex/gender are being renegotiated. However, the matrilinear writing that the author projects seems to overlook a fundamental time in the literary history of Spanish women writers, a time that can be considered a starting point. I refer to the writers of the first feminist movement, the ‘liceómanas’. e identities of these writers were concealed behind the names of their male partners (this happened with María Lejárraga, for example), forgotten by the patrilinear literary canon, and/or exiled by the hegemonic patriarchal view of literary production (as was the case with Elena Fortún and others). e liceómanas were the mothers of Matute’s generation of female authors and serve as a stark reminder of the risks taken by non-conforming women in Spain and beyond. us, exploration of the origins of Spanish women’s writings would have shed light on Matute’s cautiousness, Montero’s ambivalence, and Etxebarria’s explicitness. Oaknín’s study might also have benefited from additional exploration of Spain’s most prolific contemporary women writers, who symbolize the prevalence of feminist voices nationally and internationally in the wake of the ‘Me Too’ movement. It would be enriching if future research were to expand on Oaknín’s study by analysing the question of women’s writing through the lens of the social media and their use by contemporary writers. Overall, however, this is a valuable contribution to the field which should be of interest to students and scholars alike. M U M C A Writing and the Revolution: Venezuelan Metafiction –. By K B. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. . x+ pp. £. ISBN –– ––. In anglophone academia, contemporary Venezuelan literature is almost entirely invisible . is is not due to a lack of literary quality or prolific production, but rather  Reviews to the particular national landscape created by the Venezuelan petrostate’s political and cultural apparatus. Katie Brown’s monograph explores the intrinsic aesthetic value of literature; how it can be instrumentalized to serve political purposes; and the impact that said instrumentalization has on literary production, access to markets, as well as the creative autonomy and artistic integrity of Venezuelan writers. Brown outlines how, during the Puntofijo period (–), the state-funded professionalization of writing (p. ), literary publishing houses, and promotion ‘gave writers the economic freedom to be creative’ (p. ), producing experimental literature that did not need to cater to international markets (pp. –). Brown asserts that this partially explains the absence of Venezuelan writers from the Latin American Boom (pp. , ). e election of Hugo Chávez to the presidency in  inaugurated a new era for culture in Venezuela (p. ): the state’s cultural institutions were put at the service of the Bolivarian Revolution’s ideological project, with a vision of literature grounded in ‘nationalism, socialism, democratisation of literature, and writing as a way of documenting and transferring information rather...