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

Abstract

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.

‘The Community’ as a Multivocal Concept: Everyday Urban Life and Grassroots Politics in Caracas’ Informal Neighbourhoods

“…Corrales and Penfold 2011) to considering it a seminal moment of decolonialisation and popular sovereignty (see e.g. Kingsbury 2016). For anthropologists, it has been a fertile haven for studying the unfolding of radical political change and popular activism (see e.g.…”

On PetroCaribe: Petropolitics, energopower, and post-neoliberal development in the Caribbean energy region

“…As an ideology, coloniality works through subjects who internalize their situatedness in an unequal global order in terms of 'natural' states of development and underdevelopment (cf. Kingsbury, 2016a). When PetroCaribe would undermine the effect of the different income elasticities of oil and agricultural products, it would also subvert the injustices of coloniality by constructing a post-neoliberal, anti-imperial regional identity through energy based on cooperation and mutual aid rather than lack and vulnerability.…”

“…Venezuela has the world's largest proven oil reserves, including both conventional and nonconventional sources. These reserves have been and continue to be central in shaping Venezuelan political economy (Karl, 1997;DiJohn, 2009), foreign and domestic policy (Brands, 2011: 296;Miller, 2016: 171), and cultural identity (Coronil, 1997;Tinker Salas, 2009;Kingsbury, 2016a). From the early twentieth century, the primary concern of successive military and civilian governments became to maintain markets abroad and the outward flow of oil in order to maximize revenues for often grandiose development projects.…”