Irina Troconis, Cornell University – Living with Hugo Chávez’s Ghost

Not all who die are gone forever.

Irina Troconis, assistant professor of Latin American Studies at Cornell University, examines those who remain in one way or another.

Irina R. Troconis is Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies in the Romance Studies Department at Cornell University. Her research explores the relationship between memory, politics, and cultural production in the context of contemporary Latin America, with a specific focus on Venezuela. She is the co-editor of the digital volume Deborah Castillo: Radical Disobedience (HemiPress, 2019) (https://radicaldisobedience.hemi.press/)  and the co-organizer of the conversation series Re-thinking Venezuela. Her research has appeared in Latin American Research Review, Latin American Literary Review, Comparative Literature Studies, Revista Iberoamericana, The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory, among others. Her first book, The Necromantic State: Spectral Remains in the Afterglow of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution (Duke UP, 2025) (https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-necromantic-state) explores through the lens of spectrality the memory narratives and practices developed around the figure of Hugo Chávez in the decade following his death.

Living with Hugo Chávez’s Ghost

On March 5, 2013, Nicolás Maduro announced on national television the death of Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s former president and a key political actor in the “turn to the left” experienced by Latin American democracies at the start of the 21st century. Chávez’s death, however, was not the end of Chávez’s life. He lingers in Venezuela’s public, private, and digital spaces in the form of ghostly eyes and signatures painted on the walls of buildings, tattoos drawn on arms and foreheads, toys, memes, and a hologram haunting the streets of the country’s capital. Unlike the ghosts that frighten us or that appear unexpectedly to unsettle the status quo and remind us of the violent histories we have forgotten, Chávez’s ghost is not scary, and his apparitions are not eventful. He is an ordinary ghost. The sort of ghost that is easy to live with. The kind you forget it is even there.

That forgetting, however, comes at a cost.

In my work, I ask what happens when the state brings the dead back to life. Focusing on contemporary Venezuela and the ways the state and the people routinely work together to conjure Chávez’s ghost and imbue it with political and social power, I analyze how ghosts can help the state secure its survival and ground its authority in moments of crisis, such as the one Venezuela is currently experiencing, riddled with political tensions and uncertainty. As I explore different dimensions of what it means to live with these state-manufactured ghosts, I also wonder what listening to them and being constantly under their gaze does to our ability to imagine political futures that are radically different from the ones we know, the ones that these heroic ghosts, subtly but strongly, insist are the only ones we are allowed to have, and to want.

Read More:
[Duke University Press] – The Necromantic State
Radical Disobedience