Abstract/Summary

This book sets out to challenge the disciplinary compartmentalisation of the analysis of the material and cultural effects of oil to demonstrate that within the extractive logic of the Petrostate and the oil industry, territory, oil, and culture become indivisible. Mainly, it explores how the material and immaterial flows of oil traverse space, bureaucratic power, and culture in which the Petrosocialist Venezuelan oil state is an exemplar case study. It develops a story about Venezuela as an oil state and the way it deploys its policies to instrumentalise culture and urban space by examining the way the Petrostate is imagined in speeches, how it manifests physically in space and how it is discursively constructed in adverts. The discussion developed in this book reveals how a particular understanding culture is privileged by the oil industry and to what effect it constructs a parallel notion of cultural policy making and management, in which culture becomes inextricable from land, akin to a mineral deposit, and tightly controlled by the Petrostate. Thus, by building on the relationship between territory, bureaucratic power, and culture, the book’s unique theoretical lens provides the ideal framework to scrutinise how urban space and cultural policy function in the particular context of the oil industry.