The Necromantic State

In the spring of 2013, televisions across Venezuela announced the death of then-President Hugo Chávez, leader of the Bolivarian Revolution and key political actor in Latin America’s “turn to the left.” Chávez’s death, however, was not the end of Chávez’s life. In The Necromantic State, Irina R. Troconis examines how Chávez, as a “specter,” has lingered in Venezuela’s public, private, and digital spaces. Focusing on contemporary Venezuela and drawing from a diverse corpus that includes tattoos, toys, memes, graffiti, and a hologram haunting the streets of downtown Caracas, Troconis contends that, in moments of failed transitions, political tensions, and crises of legitimacy, the state brings the dead back to life to negotiate the terms of its survival. By showing how this necromantic performance enables the state’s material and visual manifestations in public and private spaces, Troconis untangles a sociopolitical moment in which the ghostly acts as the affective, social, and political force that grounds state authority and ensures the preservation of the status quo, as it circumscribes acts of political imagination and limits popular resistance.