"Through artistic imaginaries, media productions, social practices and spatial mappings, this book offers an insightful and original contribution to the understanding of Rio de Janeiro, one of the highly contested urban terrains in the world. Offering a rich diversity of examples extracted from lived experience, iconographic materials, and narratives, it provides innovative and compelling connections between theoretical questions and urban vignettes. Throughout the essays, the specificity of Rio de Janeiro is highlighted but framed in relation to theoretical questions that are relevant to major contemporary cities. The book underlines the dilemmas of a city that attempts to compete globally while confronting social inequality, violence, and novel forms of democratic agency. It retraces Rio de Janeiro's modernist memories as the former political/cultural capital of Brazilian intelligentsia and national culture. It explores Rio as a city of popular culture, mestizo legacies, media productions, and cultural innovation."

Beatriz Jaguaribe is a professor at the School of Communications of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She is the author of Fins de Século: Cidade e Cultura no Rio de Janeiro ( 1998); Mapa do Maravilhoso do Rio de Janeiro ( 2001); O choque do real: estética, mídia, cultura ( 2007), among other books. Her essays on urban culture, representations of the self and national imaginaries have been published in Public Culture, Space and Culture, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies and several Brazilian journals. She has been awarded the RioArte Fellowship(1999); ICAS Fellowship at NYU (2000), Guggenheim ( 2004), PLAS Fellowship at Princeton University ( 2009-2010), the Andrés Bello Chair at the King Juan Carlos of Spain Center at NYU ( 2012 ), and the CNPq award ( 2012-2015). She has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, Dartmouth College, The New School of Social Research, Princeton University and New York University.