Book Talk: A Promising Past by Dr. Vicente Lecuna

Summary of the Book:

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.

Author:

Vicente Lecuna is Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at John Jay College-CUNY, where he has served as Chair since 2019. From 1997 to 2019, he was a professor in the Literature Department at the Universidad Central de Venezuela. He has held visiting professorships at Brown University, Harvard University, Princeton University, Rice University, and the Universidad de los Andes. Lecuna’s research explores the intersections of populism, violence, urban design, and contemporary fiction in Latin American cities, with particular attention to Caracas. His work appears in Cuadernos de Literatura, Revista de Investigaciones Literarias, Revista Estudios, Revista Iberoamericana, and Voz y Escritura. In his recent book, A Promising Past: Remodeling Fictions in Parque Central, Caracas (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025), Lecuna examines the cultural fictions surrounding an emblematic multipurpose complex built in downtown Caracas in the 1970s.

Panelist

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.

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