Victor Quiroz offers a new vision of Venezuelan thinker Simón Rodríguez in a recent article
Victor Quiroz published an article, “Panoramas y Cosmoramas en la obra de Simón Rodríguez,” in Modern Languages Notes. This paper examines the visual discourse of Sociedades americanas (1828-1849) by the Venezuelan thinker Simón Rodríguez (Caracas, 1769-Amotape, 1854) in dialogue with visual spectacles like the Panorama, the Mobile Panorama, and the Cosmorama. Quiroz argues that Rodríguez materializes the experience of visual consumption of these massive shows in the text’s form dialectically. In dialogue with Walter Benjamin and Susan Buck-Morss, Quiroz demonstrates how Rodríguez recodifies these shows’ mechanisms of optical illusion to disfigure the illusions that supported the criollo republican project and reveal the colonial face of the Latin American states. This theoretical approach, which explores the connections between technology and literature, significantly reframes the debate about Rodríguez, one of the most radical 19th-century Latin American thinkers.