Year: 2016
Type: article
Abstract: Brazilian theater scholarship has traditionally regarded the nineteenth century as a dead zone, a period in which the theater was dominated by visiting foreign productions or slavish imitations of foreign methods and styles.This essay, however, seeks to challenge this assumption and to suggest how theater entered into the project of nation-building by providing a forum for discussion-among the elites-of topics such as slavery, the corruption of politics, the tension between the metropolitan and the rural, and resistance to the economic imperialism and gunboat diplomacy of European nations such as Britain.Whatever the aesthetic merits of the products of Brazilian theater at this time, and however twentieth-century Brazilian theater has been seen as disembodied from a historical corpus, the role theater played in the field of cultural production during the nineteenth century merits recuperation.The prominence of plays with abolitionist themes, such as Joao Juliao Federado Gonnett's O Marajo Virtuoso, ou os Horrores do Trafico da Escravatura, an historical drama exploring the horrors of the Middle Passage and partly extolling the virtues of the Portuguese, Brazilians, and British in fighting the cruel Spaniards who promote the slave trade, suggests how invested Brazilian theater of the period was in the issues of the day, as well as its implication in the liberal traditions of the urban elites, whose interests often conflicted with those of the landowners supporting the slavocracy.The nineteenth-century Brazilian stage remains relatively unknown to modern audiences, and critical appraisal of it as debased and dated has helped obscure its revival.From Brazilian scholarship-such as Manuel Bandeiras A Brief History of Brazilian Literature (1958), which argues that there was no
DOI: 10.62791/401sfj64
Author: Ross G. Forman
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2783739883