Cuti and the claim of black subjectivity in brazilian theater

Abstract

Systematically relegated to the background in the history of Brazilian dramaturgy, black people were (almost) always represented in a problematically way, given the racist worldview that centuries of slavery have marked the country. When not reduced to an ornament, reified or silenced and prevented from expressing themselves, black characters were often conceived under the sign of the wild and the exotic. It was until the middle of the twentieth century, when the first big movement offered a dignified space for black man to be represented in the dramatic arts: the Black Experimental Theatre (TEN), led by Abdias do Nascimento. In spite of the publication of plays for black people by the creator of TEN and published in 1961 – these texts still incur the reinforcement of some stereotypes. In this sense, until the 1980’s a representation of black people in its full complexity was lacking emotional depth. Cuti's dramaturgy, a socially involved thinker of black literature, emerges to claim the black subjectivity in Brazilian theater. In this article, we will try to demonstrate how the writer resignify the historically negative signs often related to blackness and, above all, how he subverts the racist hegemonic discourse by bringing to the proscenium the full complexity of being a black person in a world designed for white people.