In 2013, televisions across Venezuela announced the death of Hugo Chávez. Chávez’s death, however, was not the end of Chávez’s life. In this talk, Irina Troconis examines how Chávez, as a “specter,” has lingered in Venezuela’s public, private, and digital spaces. Mobilizing a methodological framework she calls "ghost h(a)unting" and focusing on contemporary Venezuela, Troconis examines a corpus that includes a computer app, collectible phone cards, and a hologram haunting the streets of Caracas, as she contends that, in moments of  political tensions and crises of legitimacy, the state brings the dead back to life to negotiate the terms of its survival. By showing how this necromantic performance enables the state’s material and visual manifestations in public and private spaces, Troconis untangles a sociopolitical moment in which the ghostly does not challenge official narratives but rather acts as a force that grounds state authority, circumscribing in the process political imagination.

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 contemporary Latin America, with a specific focus on Venezuela. She is the co-editor of Deborah Castillo: Radical Disobedience (HemiPress, 2019) and the co-organizer of the conversation series “Re-thinking Venezuela.” Her work 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) explores through the lens of spectrality the memory narratives and practices developed around the figure of Hugo Chávez in the decade following his death. Her second book project focuses on the relationship between identity, materiality, and the gaze in poetic and artistic works emerging from and about the Venezuelan diaspora.