Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento locates the post-dictatorship generation as the group born around the 1964 Brazilian military coup that came of professional age during the country's democratic transition. In many cases, the cohort of artists that emerged from this generation were not the direct victims of state violence but lived in its shadow and under constant state censorship. Their experience of dictatorship is therefore characterized by indirect trauma and fragmented memory – and has thus necessitated an imaginative and interpretive engagement with both the country's past and present. As a result, Nascimento argues, these artists have created works aimed at posing ‘epistemic questions to fill the sore gaps in their nation's history’, as well as works aimed at recuperating ‘many cultural canons and addressing colonial anxieties’ (p. 31). Nascimento seeks to connect the country's political history to the development of Brazilian contemporary theatre. Further, she documents the ongoing efforts of artists to cultivate cultural sovereignty amidst the legacy of Brazil's colonial past and the neo-colonial forces at work in the many ‘contact zones’ between today's global North and South (p. 240).

A central reference point for these tasks, both for Nascimento and for the artists she considers, is Oswald de Andrade's 1928 ‘Cannibalist Manifesto’. For Nascimento, Andrade's cultural cannibal offers a productive alternative framework to conceptualize intercultural artistic production. In contrast to analyses predicated on binary ethical arguments about appropriation, as well as Erika Fischer-Lichte's more complex framework of ‘interweaving’ cultures, the cannibal provides an irreverent model for intercultural theatre-making that eschews cultural hierarchies as he ‘eat[s], chew[s], digest[s], spit[s] and vomit[s]’ (p. 94). The cannibal's consumptive engagement with multiple cultural canons and objects serves as a decolonial method through which artists might create new forms without rejecting existing models. The cannibal appears throughout Nascimento's book in many manifestations: Cia. Livre de Teatro combines Andrade's modernist cannibal with an anthropological investigation into Amerindian cannibalistic rites (chapter 2); Cia. dos Atores cannibalize canonical texts (Hamlet, The Seagull) to create process-driven works that speak to and from the Brazilian experience (chapter 2); Grupo Galpão and Newton Moreno draw from the local traditions of their home states of Minas Gerais and Pernambuco in their treatment of classic works, adaptations of canonical Brazilian texts or development of new plays (chapter 3). Nascimento posits that Andrade's cannibal thus provides both an omnivorous methodological springboard for artists and a framework for scholars who seek to unpack the complex ways in which these artists sought to develop a theatre of their own.

In chapter 4, Nascimento departs somewhat from a consideration of the cultural cannibal to explore the ways in which theatre companies recuperated and occupied public spaces and state-owned theatres to create new geographies of cultural production. She explores how such works operated as acts of citizenship: by either reclaiming public spaces or estranging well-travelled spaces and offering previously silenced histories, companies such as Grupo Galpão, Teatro da Vertigem and the Centro de Demolição do Espetáculo forged theatrical aesthetics that contributed to the ‘country's remaking’ (p. 186). Whereas in earlier chapters Nascimento positioned Brazilian political history as largely contextual, here a number of threads – post-dictatorship cultural policy, the precarity of artists, the geography of the city and the narratives that infuse public space – come together to illuminate the connections between political histories, administrative infrastructures and art-making.

After the Long Silence offers an important rejoinder to and expansion of scholarly conversations on Latin American theatrical history – which have tended to focus on theatre produced in the continent's Spanish-speaking countries. Drawing from Brazilian cultural theory, Nascimento employs the framework of Andrade's cultural cannibal to consider how key artists of the post-dictatorship generation, such as Grupo Galpão, Teatro da Vertigem and Newton Moreno, have created aesthetics that are responsive to Brazil's dictatorial and colonial past and that might serve as mechanisms to forge a uniquely Brazilian artistic present.