Entangled Materialities charts the cultural and environmental history of Venezuela’s under-examined regional extractive zones from 1890 to 1980 to reveal their complexities, potentialities, and ontological provocations. Building on key insights in the environmental and energy humanities, I contend that Venezuela’s political and cultural discourses built around oil rendered other cultures of extraction invisible, particularly agricultural, hydrological, and mining hubs located in the Guayana-Amazon region and the Caribbean coast. These regional environments were highly attractive to satisfy domestic and foreign economic interests and cultural representations focused on material and energy consumption. They unfolded a political ecology that challenged and intermingled with the underlying logic of a fossil-fueled future. Looking at different case studies—institutional texts, photographs, films, and infrastructure—the book rethinks the relations between culture, energy, and the unequal ecology of capitalism in Venezuela. I ask how other-than-oil cultures of extraction articulated experiences of socioecological transformation in Venezuela and how a closer consideration of these cultures of extraction draws our attention to the political ecology of material entanglements to rethinking the blind spots of petromodernity as represented in the canon of Venezuelan culture and politics.

This project is financially supported by The British Academy postdoctoral scheme.