Vicente Lecuna joined the Literature Department of the Universidad Central de Venezuela in 1997, just after completing a PhD in Latin American Literature at the University of Pittsburgh. He researches and publishes on topics ranging from populism and violence to urban design and contemporary narrative in Latin America.
Vicente Lecuna
Contributions
Spectacular Modernity: Dictatorship, Space, and Visuality in Venezuela, 1948-1958 by Lisa Blackmore
This book explores the relationships between modernism, modernization, and dictatorship, and in the process repoliticizes the discussion of a crucial period in Venezuelan modernity. Blackmore approaches these relationships through Raymond Williams’s notion of a dominant cultural formation, that “sense of reality shaped by the complex interlocking of political, social, and cultural forces that permeates a whole body of practices, expectations, and aspects of life” (19). Relying on detailed historical research and archival work, Blackmore conducts a complex and nuanced examination that does not avoid the subject’s many sensitive nerves.