The nationalization of abolitionism came about when slavery returned to the institutional agenda in 1878, thanks to the full implementation of the free-womb law and the change of government. After a decade of demanding reforms in the public space, the Liberals were in power. The abolitionists seized the opportunity to step up their protest. A new generation, in part benefiting from the educational reforms of the 1870s, joined the mobilization. Among them was the black journalist José do Patrocínio, who joined Rebouças in founding an abolitionist association and started the “concert-conferences”, an expansion of Abílio Borges´s civic conferences. Held in theaters, with poetry rrecitations and operas, these events ended with the presentation of manumission certificates and a shower of flowers over the freed slaves.This was the preferred abolitionist strategy in the following years, a pacific style of mobilization, which conferred public legitimacy upon the campaign in the large cities and allowed women to enter the campaign. Numeric growth, geographic expansion, tactical variety, and the social diversity of the activists allowed the movement to become national.

This chapter focuses on the day after abolition. The Monarchy did not embrace the further reforms abolitionists demanded. Rather than rights for former slaves and land reform, political institutions worked for measures to calm down the pro-slavery reaction. The abolitionist movement then split into two factions. A small group insisted on demanding new reform of the monarchy, while the majority of skeptics did not believe the Empire was capable of doing it and engaged in the republican movement.

Gestus remains an important but elusive concept in the scholarship on Brecht’s writings and continues to inform contemporary theater practices as well as new theories of performance and performativity. This article provides a brief overview of Brecht’s evolving definitions of Gestus, including in, and through, key plays and productions, followed by an assessment of the larger literary, political, and theoretical debates associated with Weimar theater, communist agitprop, and Marxist theory. Throughout, the productivity of Gestus as a concept and practice is reconstructed through its dialogic qualities, heuristic functions, and intertextual effects.

This chapter examines the Berliner Ensemble, the theater company Brecht and his wife Helene Weigel founded in East Berlin in 1949. It considers Brecht’s desire to create an ensemble to help realize the theoretical positions he had drafted while in exile and the difficulties the Berliner Ensemble faced in its infancy. These included a lack of theater space for a new company in the wake of the devastation of World War II and intense ideological hostility from the ruling party. At times, the problems encountered posed a direct threat to the BE’s very existence, yet it was the quality of its work that ultimately saved it and allowed it to thrive on the international stage.