SORAYA MURRAY

My very first Coda! Video Games and Spatiality in American Studies, edited by Dietmar Meinel. Contributors include: Sören Schoppmeier, Stefan Schubert, Michael Nitsche, Hanne Nijtmans, Nathalie Aghoro and many more.

University of Duisburg-Essen. Volume 5 in the series Video Games and the Humanities (2022)

Out Now: My American Literary History @AmLitHist @OxUniPress review of Tara Fickle’s @fickleHQ brilliant The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities @NYUpress 2019. In it I write:

Witty, controlled, righteously outraged, inspired and incredibly persuasive, The Race Card sets a new bar for understanding the role of games and play, broadly defined, in the struggle of race relations.

https://academic.oup.com/alh/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/alh/ajac057/6539747

I’ll be sharing my research on political affect in games, by kind invitation of Raiford Guins and The Media School at Indiana U. Bloomington, as part of the Voices in Cultural Studies series. Thanks @GuinsRaiford and @IUMediaSchool

Friday, February 18, 2022, 12:40 PM – 1:40 PM EST

For more info and Zoom link access:

https://cstudies.indiana.edu/events/021822-Murray.html

No Country For Old Tropes: Representation and Political Affect in Red Dead Redemption II   

Rockstar’s iconic western-themed action adventure series, Red Dead (2004- ), is typically discussed in terms of its visual realism, historical authenticity, or how it engages with quintessential American cultural mythologies. It is often debated whether the games ultimately critique or reinforce of those values expressed within their universes. In this presentation, Murray articulates how the game’s aesthetics, appropriation of the Western genre, as well as its space and time-based experience, all contribute to a concentrated political affect that engages with an American political present—and perhaps even its potential futures. Enhancing a growing game studies discourse on inclusivity, this research further develops Murray’s visual studies of playable representation, grounded in an understanding of form as deeply enmeshed in identity politics, not separate from it.