Faculty Writing: On Bolsonarismo without Bolsonaro, and Game-World-Literature(s)
Writing in Truthout, Nara Roberta Silva reports on all the reasons why, even after the ruling that will ban Bolsonaro from holding public office (for the next eight years, at least), the threat of right-wing extremism in the Brazilian public life is nowhere near neutralized. Bolsonaro himself, she argues, “is a piece of a larger movement that is present in every corner of Brazilian society…in a hydra-headed structure, both within and outside political institutions.” Given this sort of “right-wing movement ecosystem,” with Bolsonaro more or less serving “as a symbolic unifier,” no judicial censure will suffice to eliminate his influence—and the same holds, Silva says, for any government looking to the courts to stem the tide of rising authoritarianism.
Then, in Cleveland Review of Books, Joseph Earl Thomas’s essay “I Got Daddy Issues; That’s on Kratos” refracts patriarchal inheritances, masculinity, work, worldmaking, and what it means to father sons through the video game God of War: Ragnorak. The essay is both a model and a pitch for new writing on “worldmaking, worldbuilding, world literature”: “Every day I am more interested in the social and aesthetic lives of video games, and where those games might intersect with literature and the world: forms of writing over explanation, modes of experience over representation, intensities of feeling over rote justification. In this spirit I wish to convene a call for writing on Game-World-Literature(s)”—the aim being “to ordain all kinds of sloppiness, weak theories, hard arguments and amateurism, humor and counter-intuitiveness.”