Last month, Dr Lisa Shaw, Reader in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, gave a research seminar at the Brazil Institute, King’s College London, on Afro-Brazilian performance on Rio de Janeiro’s popular stages from the 1880s to the long 1920s, which drew on a chapter of her book Tropical Travels: Brazilian Popular Culture, Transnational Encounters and the Performance of Race (University of Texas Press, forthcoming in 2017). In it she explored the historical evolution of the representation of black subjectivity in the popular entertainment venues of Rio during that period, illustrating the various tensions and contradictions that came to light as Brazilian journalists, authors, politicians, theatre-goers, impresarios, and especially performers contributed to the creation of a national identity more receptive to Afro-Brazilian cultural traditions and that drew on transnational circuits of performance. The analysis was underpinned by an understanding of ‘blackness’ as both an identity based on family lineage and…