After laying down her assumptions on images as social representations and on World's Fairs as a privileged scene for displaying the hermeneutics of reality engendered by the capitalist transformation ot the world, along with the bourgeois ideology and the utopian IIongings of the epoch, the A. briefly describes the main features of Philadelphia's Centennial Exposition in 1876. She then com ments the presence of a Brazilian pavillion and the visit of Brazil's Emperor, D.Pedro II. She finally traces a farallel between divergent meanings of the Exhibition as related to the successful auto-image o the "American dream in opposition to the contradictions of Brazilian identity, vainly endeavouring to incorporate the new ethics of free mechanical labour in a dependent proslavery society.
World Expositions; Centennial Exposition (Philadelphia, 1876); World Expositions and Brazilian identity