My dissertation examines the ways in which Brazilians of African descent used changing images of Africa to recast the meanings of citizenship and national identity. Analyzing a range of written, visual, and oral media invoking Africa, I will investigate how the women and men of a nascent ‘Afro-Brazil’ used their experience and memory of another continent to shape their national political vocabularies and social claims. I focus on the emergence and transformation of Afro-Brazil – the public arena in which images of Africa were used to re-define Brazilian identities – arguing that this arena provided a space for developing concepts of democracy, citizenship, and politicized ethnic identities throughout the 20th century.