A Promising Past - (Illuminations) by Vicente Lecuna (Hardcover)

About the Book

An Examination of Venezuelan Culture Conceptualized through Urban Renewal

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

This book is a significant theoretical contribution to Latin American studies in general and to the understanding of the cultural ambiguities modernization brought about to the region. In a prodigious argumentative tour de force, Caracas's Parque Central--a large-scale urban renewal project--serves as a model in the account of the struggle for control over the production of collective self-images.--Miguel Gomes, University of Connecticut

In A Promising Past, Vicente Lecuna offers a refreshingly interdisciplinary analysis of the confluence of aesthetic, political, and social realities in the creation and representation of Parque Central on the Caracas streetscape and in the Venezuelan imagination. His approach yields new insights into the relationship between modernity and the Latin American city while also providing a revealing angle on the political currents that have shaped Venezuela in the last half century.--Ronald Briggs, Barnard College

A Promising Past is an imaginative and innovative study that garners fascinating insight into an underrepresented area of Caracas.--Rebecca Jarman, University of Leeds

About the Author

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.