Brazil’s aesthetic U-turn: from emerging nation to international pariah

Abstract

Over the last few decades, Brazil had built the image of an emerging and progressive nation that, little by little, began to play a leading role in the international political scene. In this article, we carried out a content analysis of the Rio Olympics ceremonies – taking place in 2012 and 2016 – revealing their fragmentary references and political myths. We then compared them with the current government’s stance on environmentalism, multiculturalism, and social tolerance. Thus, it became evident that the representations of Brazil and Brazilians, internationally exhibited through the Olympic ceremonies during Rousseff’s administration, are profoundly different from the image that Bolsonaro’s regime sought to make of the country from the last years of the 2010s onwards. Despite the efforts of consecutive administrations – especially after the re-democratization in the 1980s – to convey the image of an emerging and progressive Brazil, economic recession, political crises, and, above all, the victory of a reactionary and anti-environmentalist regime in the 2018 elections challenged such romanticized national narrative, revealing a country of contrasts, where opposing fields compete for the nation both as a sociopolitical space and as a symbolic object.