Introduction

Over recent years, we have witnessed the end of the so-called Latin-American pink tide. After the neoliberal decade, leftist governments that occupied power in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Venezuela might not have fulfilled the political and social expectations they generated at the beginning of the 21st century. Some recent articles even refer to the failure or setback of the left. The uncertainty generated by this end of an era compels us to inquire about the paradigms that sustained some of these post-neoliberal projects. In particular, Laclau's theory on populism offered a conceptual foundation for the legitimization of these governments, positing that politics serve to discursively constitute an antagonism between two subjects: on the one hand, the people, and on the other, the one anathematized as anti-popular, elitist, oligarchical, imperialist (Laclau, 2005, p.99). Venezuela, as any other country in the region, reveals the devastating consequences of the construction of political binary imaginaries, not only those of the state power but also those from its opposition. As we face the collapse of the Chavist hegemony, by now bereft of a concrete alternative horizon, it is helpful to review the subjectivities and affects that did not enter the polarized political discourses of the last decade. Memories of the 1990s offer a particularly productive field, as it was in that period when disputes for the interpretive legitimacy of the current socio-political crisis were first staged.

Memory conflicts

After the early—and still unexplained—death of Venezuelan writer Alejandro Rebolledo on August 18, 2016, a debate about the “literary value” of Rebolledo's only novel, Pim Pam Pum (originally published as Pin Pan Pun in 1998) erupted on social media, reaching visceral tones. In a way, it initiated a rekindling of the debate that the work had triggered in the late 1900s, when its juvenile and irreverent proposal, to a great extent disconnected from the national lettered tradition, burst onto the literary scene. On this occasion, though, the debate about Pim Pam Pum was magnified by the historical perspective provided by the 17 years of Chavist rule.