This book is about the irresolute presence of a ghost: the ghost of Hugo Chávez—dead since 2013 yet lingering in Venezuela’s sociopolitical imagination. The Necromantic State examines the creative acts that sustain, materialize, and engage this ghost, tracing how, beginning with Chávez’s cancer diagnosis in 2011, everything built around him becomes, in Irina R. Troconis’s account, part of what would soon come to constitute his “spectral remains.” I write as a Venezuelan scholar who has been haunted by Chávez for most of her life, and reading this book felt uncannily personal. To use the author’s term, I “h(a)unted” Chávez reading it—in my apartment, in my office, on the New York City Subway—often with the uncomfortable awareness of being seen with a book about him. That feeling reveals how deeply this h(a)unting operates. Perhaps I am, even in the diaspora, also caught in what the author calls “afterglow.” As Troconis notes, writing about a ghost “requires writing with it, letting yourself be part of it, affected by it, and—it bears repeating—haunted by it.”
The Necromantic State is a study of the material and visual culture surrounding Chávez, even when it is not explicitly framed within these fields. The book departs from dominant approaches in Venezuelan studies that either center Chávez as a monolithic figure and state actor or focus on “the people” and social movements. Troconis situates her project at the intersection of both, through Chávez’s specter as a materializing and materialized sociopolitical force. As she argues, “Chávez’s specter demands that we think of it as a material space where the specter is a presence imbued with political authority, affective purchase, and social dynamism.” In this book, Chávez’s specter is not a metaphor of the revolution; it is something produced and circulated. One of the book’s most significant contributions lies precisely in this shift in perspective: it allows us to see the familiar—Chávez everywhere—in new ways. This is what ultimately makes the book so compelling. The Necromantic State offers a framework for approaching Venezuela’s recent history—one already widely debated across scholarly, media, and public discourse, yet here reframed through an original take.
The introduction lays out a set of conceptual tools that are useful well beyond Venezuelan studies. Troconis reclaims necromancy as the “state’s magical repertoire of mnemonic practices,” proposing it as a critical method rather than mere superstition. Conjuring Chávez, she suggests, is central to understanding his ongoing impact in the public sphere. Heavily in dialogue with Derrida, she distinguishes between “ghost” and “specter,” privileging the latter to emphasize its omnipresence—specters sustained by the state through contemporary technologies and material forms. Her use of “afterglow” shifts the focus to its affective duration and unresolved presence, a “state of political irresolution” that sets Venezuela apart from other contemporary Latin American contexts.
The book is divided into two parts: “Afterlife” and “Afterdeath.” Chapter one begins with Chávez’s cancer diagnosis, which initiates the long “postponement” of his death and prepares the public ground for mourning and memorialization—at the intersection of body, fact and fiction, and uncertainty—thus facilitating the later proliferation of spectral apparitions. Chapters two through four examine specific manifestations of Chávez’s specter. Chapter two analyzes the ubiquity of Chávez’s drawn eyes across objects and built environments, moving from a surveillance framework to consider them as a lingering form of haunting authority and affective, temporal dislocation. Chapter three turns to familial and vernacular images and collecting practices—phone cards with Chávez’s portraits, his signature on buildings, as tattoos, and even the font reproducing Chávez’s handwriting—which produce what Troconis calls “spectral intimacies.” Chapter four explores more uncanny forms of apparition: a hologram, a bird said to embody Chávez’s spirit, and toys and dolls. These doubled and often playful embodiments of the specter sustain the state at a moment of fragility, reanimating Chávez in public spectacle.
The interlude, “Afterdeath,” functions as a hinge, asking what to do with a specter that has become so materially ubiquitous. Chapter five shifts toward performance art, examining how artist Deborah Castillo engages Chávez through embodiment. Here, “dealing with” the specter means transforming it—creating something new from it. The book closes with a coda, offering a series of vignettes addressing cultural objects and events that gesture toward futurity. Inspired by Castillo’s work, Troconis highlights moments of vitality, of a community that persists amid uncertainty. I found this section compelling and at times wished it occupied more space—perhaps even a full chapter with more sustained close analysis—given how important these are in relation to the book’s extensive focus on Chávez.
My strongest praise goes to what Troconis calls “ghost h(a)unting”—her methodological approach grounded in fieldwork conducted in Venezuela. The book can be read as an archaeology of objects attuned to their lived practices in the present, tracing how Chávez persists through their activation. The attention to how materials operate in public space—how they are seen (and how we are seen by them), touched, collected, and inhabited—offers a valuable model for scholars and students working across disciplines. Troconis’s sensitivity to what might otherwise go unnoticed is one of the text’s most powerful strengths.
The book’s refusal to resolve its narrative is deliberate. As Troconis writes: “Nothing has changed in Venezuela in the decade following Chávez’s death, or, more accurately, whatever had changed has been less of a change and more of an accumulation and intensification of the same.” Reading this book in 2026, I cannot help but situate that claim further in the present. Whether understood through ongoing political transformations, shifting international pressures, or emerging speculative scenarios, the question remains: what would rupture the afterglow—this ongoing accumulation of the same?
Troconis ultimately leaves that question open. The Necromantic State brilliantly compels its readers to inhabit that irresolution creatively, to continue asking what it would mean for the specter either to lose its hold or to continue the political order it animates.
Cristina E. Pardo Porto is an interdisciplinary scholar of Latinx and Latin American art and visual culture, with focus on Central America and the Caribbean. She is an assistant professor at Syracuse University, researching at the intersection of historical archives, race, coloniality, migration, and the environment. Her writing can be found in Art Journal, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Hispanic Review, and MLN, among others.