Embracing Strangeness

Be it the ideal of liberal democracy, the opening of local markets to the fluctuations of international capital, or the elusive quest for development, the discursive strategies of the North and the policy orientations that they enable toward the South are well explored. Less explored, however, is the way in which the South interacts with this received wisdom. This article explicitly focuses on how Venezuela, as one of the more outspoken southern states, works within and subverts the dominant U.S.-authored tropes in Latin America. It suggests that while U.S. representations of the Chávez administration as a strange anomaly in the America’s resonate in Venezuela and beyond, it is possible for Venezuela to subvert these messages by “embracing strangeness.” That is, by embracing and expanding the difference attributed to them onto the rest of Latin America, Venezuela is able to use “strangeness” to open up possibilities for new meanings and political spaces in the Americas.