“Ao teatro! Pelos Cativos!” Theater, Antislavery, and Nation in Late Nineteenth-Century Brazil

“To the theater, for the slaves,” read an advertisement in Recife’s Diário de Pernambuco from August 1884, a slogan emblematic of how theater fit within the milieu of abolitionist activities. The site of over twenty-five theatrical dramas during the 1880s, billed by newspapers and sponsors as ‘abolitionist theatre’, the neoclassical Santa Isabel was a place where wider audiences engaged political debates.The phenomenon of abolitionist theater reverberated widely: it keyed a collective sense of struggle, the monies raised liberated slaves, and the theatrical performances played a major role in reshaping the terms and forms that characterized political debate over antislavery. Drawing oftentimes on historical events of Brazil’s past, the plays emphasized ‘antislavery’ as a founding theme of Brazilian nationalism, an unfulfilled aspect of Brazilian independence left for that generation to complete. A real and perceived threat, the provincial government forbade abolitionist theater at the state-owned Teatro Santa Isabel in 1886. Broadly, abolitionist theater merits further reckoning not only as a feature of the rapidly evolving forms of popular political participation, but also as a perspective on the shifting notions of nationalism in late-nineteenth-century Brazil.

This paper, part of a larger project on antislavery and political culture in nineteenth-century Brazil, analyzes abolitionist theater within the contours of political debate in the early 1880s, focusing primarily on the northeastern city of Recife. Drawing on newspapers, debates from the provincial and municipal governments, as well as, records of abolitionist societies, this paper will address two distinct, yet interrelated questions: how did theater change the dynamics of local political culture, and how did abolitionist theater affect standing notions of nationalism? Last, the paper will draw on some primary, but mostly secondary sources to place the findings on abolitionist theater in Recife within a wider comparative frame.