A Promising Past: Remodeling Fictions in Parque Central, Caracas (Illuminations) - Hardcover

Vicente Lecuna

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822948532 ISBN 13: 9780822948537

Verlag: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

Vicente Lecuna examines an array of fictions surrounding Parque Central, a high-rise development conceived and built by the Venezuelan government as a key component of a modernization and urban renewal project. He classifies these fictions into two types: modeling and remodeling. Modeling fictions reflect an inaugural, festive, utopian nature and herald a better future that would abolish the chaotic urban past and allow a new middle class to thrive under modern, clean, orderly, and republican conditions. By contrast, remodeling fictions recast the complex as dark, sinister, contaminated, dangerous, and dirty. Lecuna argues that the Venezuelan state was behind the modeling fictions, while the later remodeling fictions emerged from an empty space that opened during the 1980s, a period that followed oil industry collapse, rising foreign debt, currency devaluation, and mass population exodus. The state gradually abandoned its functions, thereby introducing a long period of stagnation, unemployment, deregulation, and the rise of an informal economy, setting the stage for authoritarian takeover.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Vicente Lecuna is professor of Latin American literature and culture and chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822948532
• ISBN 13: 9780822948537
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 192
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar