Jarman, RSE orcid.org/0000-0002-9332-5634 (2017) Bolivarian landslides? Ecological disasters, political upheavals and (trans)national futures in contemporary Venezuelan culture. Ecozon@ : European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 8 (1). pp. 22-41. ISSN 2171-9594
Abstract
In December 1999, the so-called 'Vargas Tragedy' destroyed the Venezuelan coast after days of torrential rain caused over fifty landslides in the greater metropolitan area of Caracas. The disaster coincided with a referendum to redraft the Venezuelan constitution during the first year of Bolivarian Socialism, and was conceived of as a punctual political event that marked the beginning of a new historical period for Venezuela. This understanding of the landslides has been contested by authors and filmmakers who negotiate ecological crises as complex multitemporal, transnational processes. Focusing on the use of child protagonists in Una tarde con campanas (2004), a novel by Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez, and El chico que miente (2011), a film directed by Marité Ugás, this article analyses the creative strategies employed in contemporary Venezuelan culture that foreground alternative responses to the landslides. On the one hand, I argue that adolescence is used in these texts as a figurative device that rebels against the politicisation of the disaster and thus, by extension, undermines the state’s elision of a post-catastrophic and post-capitalist future. On the other, I argue that childhood is mediated as a heterogeneous site that defies facile reification, much like the disaster, and invites a reconsideration of the ways in which we conceptualise the relationship between the human and the non-human.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2017, Ecozon@. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (CC-BY-NC )]. |
Keywords: | Bolivarian socialism; Venezuela; landslides; Disaster Studies; Vargas Tragedy; Childhood Studies; Latin American Studies; ecocriticism |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of Languages Cultures & Societies (Leeds) > Spanish & Portuguese (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 26 Jan 2017 10:08 |
Last Modified: | 10 Mar 2021 16:12 |
Published Version: | http://ecozona.eu/article/view/1056 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and the Environment; Universidad de Alcalá de Henares |
Identification Number: | 10.37536/ECOZONA.2017.8.1.1056 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:111219 |