Fernando Coronil (November 30, 1944 Caracas – August 16, 2011, New York City) was a Venezuelan anthropologist and historian best known for his study of the politics of oil in Venezuela.
[1] Coronil’s father, a Venezuelan man of Andalusian descent, occupied an influential position as an experimental surgeon at the Hospital Vargas de Caracas.
In this position, Coronil took an active role in politics, which at one point led him to distribute material criticizing the policies of then-president Rómulo Betancourt.
The local authorities’ interest in Coronil’s political activity contributed to his parents’ later decision that his university education should take place abroad.
[1][2]: 14 In 1963, Following his early engagement with Venezuelan politics, Coronil traveled to the United States, where he attended Stanford University as an undergraduate student.
Upon his return to the United States, Coronil was detained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service and subsequently expelled from the country "as a subversive agent, although no specific charges were ever disclosed".
[16] In 2000, Coronil published an essay entitled Beyond Occidentalism, which refers to the writing of post-colonial Marxist scholar and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon to introduce a geohistorical critique of Western self-conception, as part of a larger deconstruction of the poetics behind imperial geographic ideas.
[17] At the time of his death, Coronil was working on a book entitled Crude Matters, regarding the former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and the attempted 2002 coup against his administration.