Dystopian Chronicles of Brazil’s Shift to the Far Right: B. Kucinski’s New Order and Its Collapse

ABSTRACT While Bolsonaro’s presidency (2019–2022) has received much scholarly attention, almost nobody has addressed this exceptional period in a work of fiction. The writer and political scientist B. Kucinski is an exception. His novels A nova ordem (The New Order), published in June 2019, six months into Bolsonaro’s presidency, and O colapso da nova ordem (The Collapse of the New Order), published in August 2022, three months before Bolsonaro’s failed re-election, offer literary assessments of this fraught moment in Brazil’s history. This article examines how this fictionalization perceives and treats the phenomenon of the Brazilian Far-Right shift. It argues that perception is determined by the experience of twentieth-century forms of Latin American state authoritarianism (“military dictatorship”), while literary treatment follows the scheme of a classical totalitarian dystopia. This fictionalization ignores or dismisses central claims of the global New-Right’s ideology that are shared by the Brazilian movement. These are inspired by antimodernist ideologies and skepticism toward the state, as expressed, for example, in diagnoses like “cultural Marxist control” and “death culture of abortionism.” This discussion explores how Kucinski’s perspective affects and possibly limits the political function of dystopian fiction.