Towards a Poetics of Disenchantment: Modernity, Authoritarianism, and Venezuelan Lyricism (1958-2018)

Venezuela's field of cultural production has traditionally been affected by the country's complex relation with an uneven modernity built upon the shaky grounds of the oil industry. Official discourses have conveyed worldviews rigidly organized by polarities. The opposition of progress and backwardness usual in late twentieth-century democracy was absorbed into a new set of polarities-revolution/reaction, patriotism/treason, anti-Americanism/pro-Americanism, etc.-associated with early twenty-first century chavista ideology. This article argues that, at least from the first years of democracy to Nicolas Maduro's times, poets have been challenging the prevalent binarism of official discourses through a language characterized by liminality and a Weltanschauung infused with indeterminacy. Three types of liminality and their direct or indirect political implications will be analyzed.