Amid the surge of populist movements on the Left and Right around the world, Angela Marino's Populism and Performance in the Bolivarian Revolution of Venezuela offers a timely and original study that masterfully illuminates its vexed subject through a performance lens. Marino contests the misconception that populism is synonymous with authoritarianism and demagoguery to suggest that populism can open “alternative political possibilities” that “catalyze debate and reorganize power” (9). With a focus on cultural performances of populism in Venezuela, she maps the rise of the Bolivarian Revolution (1999–present). Marino defines populism as “a unifying strategy of collective identification” and an “embodied act” (10), and argues that performance was fundamental in the emergence of populism in Venezuela. Rather than frame populism as “primarily the doing of leaders and nations” (13), she centers on the everyday citizens, grassroots organizations, and artists who shape the political and social order. While scholarship on populism focuses extensively on text-based analysis and political discourse, Marino foregrounds a performance approach that attends to obscured “embodied, spatial, and temporal dimensions” (11). Her analysis weaves innovative ethnographical research and a critical engagement with theories of populism and performance that draw from a rich archive including religious celebrations, theatre, political speeches, campaign ads, and state icons.

Throughout the book, Marino evocatively shows how Venezuelan performance and popular culture challenge approaches to populism that reduce its logic to dualisms or a singular concept. To do so, she traces the prominence of the devil figure in Venezuelan cultural production through a range of examples, from historical fiesta dances to political propaganda. The polytheistic, festive devil figure unravels “good versus evil” and “one of us or one of them” binaries (84), transforming dualisms into spaces of negotiation, ambiguity, and plurality. A vibrant cultural presence around the country, the festive devil is “constantly redefining the boundaries of the social good and questioning who has the right to decide” (34) through centuries of exchange and transmission.

Whereas Latin American revolutions in Cuba and Nicaragua looked toward an imagined future through the figure of the New Man and New Woman, Marino convincingly locates the roots of Venezuelan populism in the past. Populism does not arrive with the Bolivarian Revolution, she argues, but instead is “shaped by longtime particular histories and performance practices” (33) that have existed as a strategy for collective organizing and autonomous governance among historically excluded populations, particularly indigenous and Afro-descendent groups. Accordingly, the first half of the book explores pre–Chávez era dance, theatre, and film beginning with the Corpus Christi devil dance, a centuries-old religious performance that takes place annually in rural Aragua coastal towns.

In the first chapter, Marino proposes the term “fiesta politics” to illustrate the ways in which people “come together to contribute different resources to a unifying event, problem, or concept” (31). While studies of fiesta dances generally focus on the temporary inversion of the dominant order during a procession, Marino's extensive research encompasses the broader networks and social welfare services of the dance's organizing groups to reveal the ways in which their work continually challenges legacies of religious and colonial power (67–8). The second chapter covers the rise of fiesta politics among the working class and poor residents of the urban barrio settlements built in the peripheries of Caracas during the wave of rural immigration in the 1950s. Marino analyzes the play Caín adolescente (1955) and the film Pandemonium (1997) from Venezuelan playwright and director Román Chalbaud to delineate the emergence of populism “from the cultural and material construction of the barrio and those who live there” (79) through autonomous governance, informal infrastructure, and the formation of a collective identity outside official systems.

The latter half of the book turns to the role of performance in politics during the Bolivarian Revolution. In Chapter 3, Marino recounts the Chávez campaign's reanimation of the familiar legend “Florentino and the Devil” during the 2004 recall elections, when the campaign aligned Chávez with the humble peasant who defeats tyranny in a battle of riddles (117). Covering an impressive range of materials including speech, propaganda, and art, Marino narrates how the creative recasting of the story in the hands of the campaign and their supporters engendered new forms of democratic political participation. The fourth chapter is a captivating study of national symbols in which Marino proposes three turns, or resignifications, of the revolutionary hero Simón Bolivár's horse. The first turn is the state's reversal of the horse image on the Venezuelan coat of arms in 2006 to depict the horse running unhindered to the left, rather than to the right, in representation of the country's political change and future (139). In the second turn, a mural portrays Bolivár as part of the popular class as he rides his horse surrounded by Afro-Venezuelan and indigenous community members (144). The final example brings the reader back to the Aragua coast to examine conflicting historical accounts of Bolivar turning his horse to flee an alleged ambush during an expedition in 1816 (148). In addition to analyzing documentation of this historical moment, Marino discusses an educational project in the region that confronts dominant retellings of the Revolution of Independence through oral traditions centered on Afro-Venezuelan histories in the country's political formation (157).

Populism and Performance in the Bolivarian Revolution of Venezuela promises contributions to studies in theatre and performance, populism, and Latin American history and culture. Marino's thorough and insightful book offers a compelling model for wide-reaching performance repertoires and analyses that inform an understanding both of the Bolivarian Revolution and of contemporary politics more broadly.