Samba is Rio de Janeiro’s most powerful form of artistic expression, but also one of the city’s main clichés. It is a cliché of "national identity", cliché for the people and for the Nation State. However, more fundamental than its capture in these clichés, making it powerless, samba is a line of flight or - even better than that - it is a series of lines of flight, according to the different modes by which it has been reinvented throughout the (...) 20th century. Samba draws Rio’s map, with its sections and territorial occupations : shaping territories and being shaped by them, inventing bodies according to their performances. The performances go against asepsis, physical disciplines, and the separation that one tries to inflict on the city’s territories. In short : samba is a permanent interplay between biopolitical resistance and the action of biopower. (shrink)