Between 2016 and 2023 the Brazilian Ministry of Culture (MinC) was abolished and reinstated twice. This dissertation explores how disputes about the nature of democracy in Brazil have coalesced around ‘culture’ over recent years by examining a set of progressive cultural policies that have been implemented since 2004 in the context of the first Workers’ Party administration under Gilberto Gil as the Minister of Culture. Amongst these policies is the program Pontos de Cultura which marked the first time the Brazilian state took measures to actively secure the cultural rights of historically marginalized sectors of the population. The focus on securing and actualizing rights explicitly locates the program within the horizon of the Brazilian Constitution of 1988, also referred to as the Citizen Constitution, which extended a set of socioeconomic rights to actors who had not have these guaranteed previously. Aimed at grassroots institutions engaging in some form of cultural activity (ranging from community memory projects to theatre troupes and blocos de carnaval), Pontos de Cultura offered financial support to selected initiatives and designated them as pontos de cultura (‘cultural points’). By 2012, several thousands of such pontos existed all over Brazil. Based on 22 months of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research between 2015 and 2019 at pontos de cultura in the metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro (including the municipalities of the Baixada Fluminense, the neighboring city of Niterói and the countryside of the state) as well as amongst policy makers and administrators, this dissertation analyzes the singular dynamic which the program developed in the urban peripheries in the state of Rio de Janeiro and the forms of political imagination it has given rise to. The policies under study explicitly proposed a critical engagement with existing concepts of ‘culture’ in Brazil. By tracing the different connotations that ‘culture’ has acquired over time and in relation to different political moments, the dissertation demonstrates how the conceptual associations between culture and the nation, culture and the state as well as culture and democracy in Brazil have made cultural policy a potent catalyst for novel ways in which actors from the urban peripheries articulate claims to the state, as well as a central site of dispute about the moral future of the country.