ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the nature of black civil rights discourse and its relationship to the black conceptualization of the nation in the 1930s and 1940s. Mandating civil rights implies a ‘civil society’, governed by a set of written or unwritten laws which define the relationship of the state to citizens. Civil Rights are those which appertain to man in right of his being a member of society. The chapter shows how Getulio Vargas’ nationalist practices helped to shape the limits of black political and cultural expression and how blacks’ organized and voiced their protests. In the dawn of Getulio Vargas’ nationalist regime, 1930-1945, and two decades after the modernist movement in Brazil, the new revolutionary black theater became the instrument for liberation for many Afro-Brazilians. Afro-Brazilians slighted by the effects of nationalism emerged tentatively with the creation of Teatro Experimental do Negro which was first conceived as a cultural forum for black cultural expression on the stage.
