Long overlooked within Latin American literary studies and the broader circuits of publishing and criticism, Venezuelan literature has gained new visibility in recent years. That visibility owes much to the growth of the Venezuelan diaspora, as more than a quarter of the country’s population left during the 2010s and 2020s, changing where Venezuelan literature is published and read and bringing it into new national and transnational contexts.

This seminar brings together current work on contemporary Venezuelan literature, with particular attention to the methods and critical problems shaping the field. We invite papers that approach Venezuelan literary production through questions of national literary history, migration and diaspora, gender and sexuality, race, ecology, violence, technology, and politics, though we also welcome other approaches. We are particularly interested in work that questions the boundaries of “Venezuelan literature” itself as writers and texts circulate beyond the nation.

The seminar ultimately asks what critical conversations become possible when Venezuelan literature is approached not as a marginal case within Latin Americanism but as a body of work that brings into view questions the field has often treated as peripheral.