Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2016 DOI:10.1111/blar.12477 Oil’s Colonial Residues: Geopolitics, Identity, and Resistance in Venezuela DONALD V. KINGSBURY University of Toronto, Canada This article argues oil occupies a central role in the discursive universe of Venezuelan underdevelopment, producing anxieties of vulnerability and dependency. These anxieties are internalised and reproduced in what I describe as the coloniality of oil. Coloniality naturalises, hides, and rewrites maldevelopment – a process in which the developed world stymies growth elsewhere through the machinations of hard or soft power – as underdevelopment – a neutral category suggesting the devel- oping world need only to catch up to the North Atlantic. Animated by the formation of new political subjectivities, the Bolivarian Revolution has attempted to break with this coloniality of oil. Keywords: Bolivarian revolution, coloniality, maldevelopment, petroleum, Venezuela. Venezuela has been an oil country since the early twentieth century. Of course, oil contours the economies, the geography of town and country, the reasons for and tech- nologies of warfare, the limits and prerogatives of sovereignty, and the exploitation and desecration of environments and their inhabitants in all late modern states. However, it does so unevenly. If all of modernity is soaked to its bones with oil, Venezuela’s position within that modernity is different than producer and consumer states like Canada, Nor- way, or the United States. For Venezuela, oil is linked to a deformed republican project. It has become perhaps the dominant signiier of underdevelopment. In Venezuela, oil occupies an important place in the discursive universe of under- development, one that has historically produced a self-defeating political subject among elites and which exacerbates already marked anxieties of vulnerability, depen- dency, and modernisation. These anxieties are internalised and reproduced in what I describe – adapting the work of Aníbal Quijano to what Fernando Coronil sugges- tively described in terms of a ‘global division of nature’ in the modern world system (Coronil, 1997: 29–42) – as the coloniality of oil. Coloniality naturalises, hides, and rewrites maldevelopment as underdevelopment. It obscures historically-rooted pro- cesses through which the developed world of the North Atlantic has actively hindered economic growth and political independence in the South. The seemingly neutral category of underdevelopment in turn suggests the developing world need only catch up with the developed north (Coronil, 2011: 246; Escobar, 2012: 6). Coloniality is a uniquely capitalist power formation, aimed at controlling labour and resources, but its inluence spreads beyond the immediate relations of production, colonising the epistemological frameworks, assumptions, and lifeworlds at the very core of modernity (Quijano, 2014: 285). More than simple racism, then, coloniality’s articulation of race, © 2016 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2016 Society for Latin American Studies. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 1