Rather than seeking a singular essence or fixed definition of Venezuelan diasporic narratives, this session traces overlapping motifs, scenes, and formal strategies that reveal a complex web of similarities across diverse cultural productions from visual art to literature. The panel focuses on the familiar resemblances, both literal and figurative, emerging from nostalgic perspectives that problematize issues of gender roles, belonging, and cultural identity represented and negotiated in the work of diasporic Venezuelan artists and writers. This special session topic is timely as it takes into account the diverse realities of a creative community that maintains a complex nostalgic relationship with Venezuela and its unforeseen migration crisis.

To promote discussion, we have selected only three panelists who will be strictly limited to 15-minute paper presentations. We will begin with “Family Structures in the Sculptural Works of Marisol” by Ph.D. Candidate Waleska Solorzano. This presentation examines the intersection of etymology, art history, and domestic culture in Marisol’s sculptural works by focusing on how her work challenges traditional notions of gender, family, and social conventions. Starting with an analysis of the term “structure” from the Latin “structura,” meaning “an adjustment” or “mode of building,” Solorzano shows how the French-born, Venezuelan-American artist Marisol Escobar, simply known as Marisol, constructs alternative spaces of belonging through her use of found objects and mixed media to encourage communal experiences that challenge societal expectations of gender that are particularly salient in Venezuelan culture and society. Drawing on José Esteban Muñoz’s definition of queerness as a political project, Solorzano analyzes Marisol’s critique of heteronormative gender roles and the nuclear family via her tableau vivant format. This theatrical approach invites viewers into participatory, intimate scenes. Solorzano closely reads sculptures such as The Family (1969), The Family (1963), Mi Mama y Yo (1968), and The Party (1965–66) to demonstrate how Marisol disrupts conventional representations of class and social order by disorienting viewers with lifelike depictions of uncanny yet familial moments. Solorzano reflects on the nostalgic idealization of past domestic roles to link Marisol’s critique to contemporary debates on family, marriage, and identity in the United States and across the Venezuelan diaspora.

We continue with the presentation by Ph.D. Student Johann Kirchenbauer, “Mourning from Abroad: Negotiating Familial Relationships in Two Different Spaces.” In his paper Kirchenbauer argues that the depiction of familial relationships in contemporary Venezuelan diasporic narratives can be seen as a negotiating act between their experiences as migrant subjects and their claim to their new geographies and senses of belonging. Kirchenbauer’s study looks at the reworking of family relationships in times of loss in both Barrera Tyszka’s “Ashes” and Val de la Ville’s “The Bermuda Triangle, or I will tell you who I am” (both titles his translation). While the former follows three siblings negotiating the loss of their parents and home in different manners, the latter depicts a character whose loss of home pushes her to create a new family abroad. By delineating their connections to sanguineous, and non-sanguineous family members, these characters showcase how diasporic subjects foment the “reworking of family relationships and a reimagination of the very notion of family” (Long 243) and the definition of place as one based on “connections between people” (Cresswell 18).

Our third and final paper, “Kinships of Cultural Resistance: Familiar Resemblance in Daniel Centeno Maldonado’s La vida alegre.” Though set against the backdrop of a failed state and refracted through the cultural resonance of diasporic nostalgia, Rivas explains that La vida alegre is a novel that resists the negative use of cultural dissonance that typifies most Venezuelan diasporic narratives of the 21^st century. Instead, the novel portrays a series of picaresque survival strategies, where the cultural expression of humor, music, and popular practices becomes both a coping mechanism and a familiar site of identification and reassembly for fragmented subjects struggling to exist in a nation in crisis. Mismatched in generation and genre, the paired protagonists, Dalio and Poli, resemble one another, not through fixed traits, but through overlapping failures, improvisations, and affective gestures. They form a strategic kinship recognizable in Wittgensteinian terms: they share no singular identity or origin, but rather a constellation of shifting resemblances based on their daily practices and desires. The paper argues that Dalio and Poli are relational figures of symbolic cultural dissonance who form a kinship of resemblance. They mirror each other in their failed ambitions, self-parody, and creative stubbornness, fostering a positive collaboration that becomes a metaphor for improvised cultural continuity in a society that seems to be falling apart.