Blackness in movement: identifying with capoeira Angola in and out of Brazil

Abstract

This article addresses the contemporary practice of the danced fighting-form and ritualized game known as capoeira Angola, in and beyond Brazil. Located in terms of the Black Atlantic, the practice of this art places the meaning of ‘blackness’ doubly in movement: in the embodied experience of the game, no less than across the varied cultural and historical contexts to which practitioners associate such experiences. Attentive to both the shifting dynamic of the game – alternately playful, serious or one disguised as the other – and to the mobile interpretations practitioners give to the game and to its history of racialized conflict, our analysis likewise privileges the uncertainties of movement over the desire for fixity. Adopting a multi-sited approach juxtaposing four different ethnographic perspectives – on the game, and that of particular practitioners – in Brazil and in France, we treat capoeira as a diasporic constellation of identity-in-difference spurring varied and novel forms of identification.

Keywords:

• capoeira
• performance
• Black Atlantic
• blackness
• Brazil
• France

Notes

1. See Dorst (2000), Hanchard (2003) and Pinho (2004) for responses to this accusation.

2. As anthropologist Johannes Fabian (2007), p. 146) writes of such ethnographic ‘encounters’: ‘It has been said that ‘having been there’ is what gives authority to the ethnographer. But this is perhaps not enough. The phrase should be extended – ‘having been there and then’ – to emphasize the event-character of ethnography, its temporal and therefore historical nature that, as far as anthropology is concerned, is enacted not just by being in places but by participating in events in the presence of others’.

3. This debate on origins, about which much ink has been spilled (see Vieira and Assunção 1998, Assunção 2005), might be productively refigured from the angle of racial sincerity as opposed to authenticity, but the intricacies involved would entail a paper in its own right.

4. Scott associates this ladainha foremost with Mestre Valmir, by whom he first heard it sung and to whom he has informally heard the composition of the song attributed. Nonetheless, as with ladainhas (and other capoeira songs) in general, these songs circulate among mestres and practitioners without attributing authorship to one particular mestre.

5. As Angela Davis says in her commentary on blues songs composed and sung by women on the theme of travel: ‘The traveling blues man is a familiar image. But the traveling blues woman is not familiar. Although travel was generally a distinctly male prerogative, there were some women who, because their lives were not primarily defined by their domestic duties, were as mobile as men’ (Davis 1998, p. 71). Although, in the case of capoeira songs, an overtly female perspective is infrequently voiced, this ladainha at least does not exclude its being sung in such terms. Indeed, Scott's reading of this song is no doubt influenced by the fact that his only recorded version of this ladainha is sung by a woman – mestre Janja, in the ‘CD’ produced by her capoeira Angola group based in São Paulo, Grupo Nzinga, in 2003.

6. See Ochoa (2007) for a much more extensive discussion of Kalunga in the context of Cuba, whose strong resonances to our own discussion lends further substance to the Black Atlantic conception.