Specters of the Market: Consumer-Citizenship and the Visual Politics of Race and Inequality in Brazil

Based on eighteen months of ethnographic research in Rio de Janeiro, this dissertation explores the ways in which advertising and campaigns serve as a lens through which to examine the construction of the consumer citizen and formation of a public within the nation-state, modifying the relationship between nationalism, citizenship, and difference through various Brazilian campaigns. By campaigns I mean the kinds of mass communications that address a public, and call for an action to promote an idea, person or object. From a political or public health campaign to an advertising campaign, I turn to these technologies to consider how the state and market vie for power over how to represent a public. I look at these campaigns to show how they discipline subjects, and subjects learn to discipline themselves and other citizens. I argue that campaigns 1) promote normative culture by reconfiguring difference, 2) creates publics that exclude, include and expand audiences, yielding --ultimately- to the kinds of contradictions symptomatic of today's market democracies.;Each chapter exposes campaign case studies, as a `specter of the market' that reflects a kind of aesthetic and biopolitical governmentality increasingly on display in a democratizing and neoliberalizing Brazil, especially on the cusp of Mega-events. Given the recent nation-wide protests against certain forms of neoliberalizing practices, of which the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics amplify, this dissertation centers on these cultural politics of visibility. It evaluates the various ways in which the state and the market compete over representations of subjects. The struggle for rights by marginalized citizens and ensuing identity politics notwithstanding, this research evaluates this process of public-making as mediated and embodied, comparing consumer advertising to public propaganda in Brazil to highlight the resultant inequalities.;As citizens voice their rights around extractive resources as common goods, like oil, examine the myth of racial democracy operative in the construction of images for advertising, these explorations show the shifting cultural politics of visibility writ into this process. The recent shifts in public space and the dispossession of informal economies and habitats as Rio de Janeiro makes way for democratic spectatorship raise questions about the role of transnational capital flows and markets in the cosmopolitan training of everyday residents of Rio, de Janeiro, which have been obviated by the recent 2013 massive protests for democracy.