Dismantling the dark side of the “Good Citizen”: decolonial contributions in times of Bolsonarism

Abstract

This article is the result of transdisciplinary reflections that collaborated with a psychosocial understanding of Bolsonarism and resistance to it in Brazil. Through the analysis of dispersed narratives in public daily life, we outline some axes of analysis-intervention for the phenomenon of adherence to this Brazilian-style conservatism embedded in the past, but crossed by a new semantics of the current Western-colonial policy. Bolsonarism, in this sense, points to a psychosocial atmosphere sustained from a subject/society split that produces discourses and authoritarian positions immersed in a project of revenge that now seems to be approaching its realization. In addition, issues related to emancipatory experiences involving markers of class, gender, race, sexuality and territory seem to be at the heart of claims for and against Bolsonarism. We bet, then, on a psychosocially engaged praxis that can assume, from the historical matrices of political resistance of Latin-Brazilians, one of the broad anti-Bolsonarist fronts