Spectacular Modernity: Dictatorship, Space, and Visuality in Venezuela, 1948-1958

by Lisa Blackmore

Overview

Winner, 2018 LASA Venezuela Section Fernando Coronil Award

In cultural history, the 1950s in Venezuela are commonly celebrated as a golden age of modernity, realized by a booming oil economy, dazzling modernist architecture, and nationwide modernization projects. But this is only half the story. In this path-breaking study, Lisa Blackmore reframes the concept of modernity as a complex cultural formation in which modern aesthetics became deeply entangled with authoritarian politics. Drawing on extensive archival research and presenting a wealth of previously unpublished visual materials, Blackmore revisits the decade-long dictatorship to unearth the spectacles of progress that offset repression and censorship. Analyses of a wide range of case studies—from housing projects to agricultural colonies, urban monuments to official exhibitions, and carnival processions to consumer culture—reveal the manifold apparatuses that mythologized visionary leadership, advocated technocratic development, and presented military rule as the only route to progress. Offering a sharp corrective to depoliticized accounts of the period, Spectacular Modernity instead exposes how Venezuelans were promised a radically transformed landscape in exchange for their democratic freedoms.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822964384
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	04/24/2017
Series:	Pitt Illuminations
Edition description:	1
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Lisa Blackmore is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich and will join the school of philosophy and art history at the University of Essex as a lecturer in art history and interdisciplinary studies in 2017. She has taught at the University of Leeds, Universidad Simón Bolívar, and Universidad Central de Venezuela, and is coeditor of the forthcoming volume El Helicoide: From Futuristic Mall to Panoptic Prison.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Rethinking the Politics and Aesthetics of Modernity 3

Part I Official Libretto

1 Telling Stories: The Historiographical Foundations of Military Rule 29

2 Ruling Ideology: Radical Transformations of Space and Body 48

Part II Setting the Scene

3 Nation Branding: From Covert Propaganda to Corporate Publicity 75

4 Spectacular Visuality: Enframing the Landscape, Training the Gaze 101

5 Exhibiting Modernity: Cultures of Display and the Dictator's Visionary Gaze 126

Part III Performing Progress

6 Subjects Onstage: Organized Walking in Scripted Spaces 153

7 Bringing Progress Home: Modern Mythologies in Daily Life 179

Epilogue: Specters of Spectacle 207

Notes 215

Bibliography 239

Index 251

Editorial Reviews

In a present that scorns the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, the underlying framework of modernization that characterized it retains surprising traction. Blackmore’s Spectacular Modernity is a beautiful and engaging text that deploys an aesthetic and political analysis of the dictatorship’s transformation of space to explain why this is. She makes an undeniable contribution to studies of Venezuela and modernity more broadly, and offers a sharp warning to those who might turn back the democratic clock in search of an elusive modernity.”
—George Ciccariello-Maher, Drexel University


“Spectacular Modernity is an in-depth study of the relationship between dictatorial power and the production of the modern imaginary of Venezuela. Blackmore’s book is a groundbreaking contribution to scholarship on mid-twentieth century modernization in Latin America.”
—Patricio del Real, Harvard University

“Between 1948 and 1958, Venezuela's modernity, Blackmore argues, was spectacular: it centered on the development of work that visibly expressed progress and innovation while masking coercive and undemocratic dictatorial practices that could hinder what was essential to the development of the nation.”
—Choice

"Blackmore's book offers fresh critical light on modernization and is an engaging, discipline-spanning study of politics, aesthetics, space, and subjectivity that will benefit many audiences and debates."
—Bulletin for Latin American Research 


"To tell the story of mid-twentieth century Venezuela, Blackmore stitches together politics, economics, architecture, infrastructure, and visual culture."  
—European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies

“Blackwell’s monograph Spectacular Modernity analyzes the construction and representation of modernist architecture by post-World War II dictatorial governments. Her narrative is punctuated by a robust set of archival photographs and reproductions that highlight how multimedia facilitated nuanced forms of political suppression.”
—Latin American Research Review
 

“Lisa Blackmore’s Spectacular Modernity is a superbly rich and illuminating book that tracks this dramatic urban transformation. . . . Her riveting account of the spectacles staged to sustain the modernizing regime is also a crucial lesson in the culture of Venezuelan politics.” —Bulletin of Spanish Studies

From the Publisher