After the Long Silence: The Theater of Brazil's Post-Dictatorship Generation by Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento (review)

This well-researched monograph is a rich cultural studies resource not only for Brazilian theatre but also in Brazilian cultural and political history during the dictatorship of 1964-1985. One of the richest features of the book is that it includes cultural articles well beyond the plays themselves, incorporating primary and secondary sources, such as playbills, program notes, seminal writings, and interviews or testimonies with actors, directors, playwrights, scholars, and critics. Comparatively, with some notable exceptions, such as the brilliant scholarship of Severino J. Albuquerque and Margo Milleret, very few studies on Latin American theatre include Brazil in their pages. As the author notes in the first chapter, this absence resonates directly with curricula in academic departments throughout the U.S., where Luso-Brazilian studies are often relegated to secondary importance or altogether marginalized.

The extensive historical preface is much more than it promises to be. As a comprehensive periodization of the sociopolitical and cultural antecedents to the post-dictatorship playwrights and artists the author meticulously studies throughout her work, it provides an excellent overview of twentieth-century dictatorships in Brazil and also draws careful parallels with Chile and Argentina. The section on "The stage under the dictatorship" is particularly useful for understanding and teaching Brazilian modern theatre, introducing the reader to various theatre companies that pre-existed and, in some cases, survived or thrived during (post)dictatorship. Nascimento later traces continuities and transformations of these various companies. Examples include Teatro de Arena, which lasted from 1953 to 1972, Oficina, which began in 1958 and is still operational today, and Opinião, whose existence from 1964-82 spanned nearly the entire dictatorship. Not only does the author successfully analyze the genesis and development, but the accessibility of the language throughout the text makes it of interest to both scholars and students of contemporary Brazilian theatre. Particularly helpful are the author's considerations of the foreign and domestic influences that shaped the Brazilian theatre of the last century, while never losing sight of what Nascimento deems "the corrupt relationship between the South American bourgeoisie and North American imperialism" (17).

This well-written monograph deserves praise and a prominent place in university library collections and in the personal archives of scholars of Brazilian studies and Latin American theatre. My criticism involves the use of language rather than the excellent content of the book itself. The early readings on Brazilian anthropophagy (chapter 2) tend to minimize the inherent violence implied in the selective digestion and subsequent expulsion process of our performative cannibal. Nascimento would have our antropófago digest "only the nutritious parts and spit out everything else […] to redirect the country's subaltern dependency on European culture […] to once and for all upset passive acquiescence to European models." There is a violently transgressive side of literary cannibalism that does not only seek good nutrition but also decadence and even destruction as postcolonial resistance to imposed imperialism, one of (r)ejection but also reassertion of (in)dependence from the act of forced feeding. Therefore, instead of "eat," I would have preferred the use of terms like "transgress," "subvert" and "devour," which more accurately reflect the decadent banquet in the process of deglutição rather than a "nutritious meal" and which might satisfy the middle-class rather than épater le bourgeois, which Oswald de Andrade had hoped to do, despite his own privileges.

The author does an admirable job of bringing both queer studies and representations of HIV/AIDS center stage in the final chapters of her book. Unfortunately, however, Nascimento denies attention to female playwrights, excluding even canonical or mainstream dramaturgs such as Leilah Assumpção or Consuelo de Castro, thus avoiding the question of gender representation and inequality among playwrights and directors. There are occasional spelling or typographical errors, especially in the longer quotes and within the author's meticulous endnotes. Also missing from the monograph is a bibliography or list of works...