The jogo de capoeira and the fallacy of ‘creole’ cultural forms

Abstract

In the early nineteenth century numerous enslaved Africans in Rio practiced the jogo de capoeira, a dynamic pugilistic game blending kicks and acrobatic defenses into a corporal chess like competition. Scholars typically frame this art form as a Brazilian ‘creole’ – a hybrid formed from an untraceable bricolage taken from all the kinesthetic repertoires of the hundreds of different African ethnicities represented among the enslaved population of Brazil. In this article, I demonstrate the degree to which ‘creole’ is an intellectually untenable category by comparing the trans-national histories of Rio de Janeiro's jogo de capoeira and New York City's boxing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The double standard revealed by this empirical analysis highlights that, contrary to claims that the creole concept somehow destabilizes racial absolutes, it is ultimately complicit in the reproduction of racial essentialism.

Keywords:

• jogo de capoeira
• boxing
• African diaspora
• Angola
• creole

Notes

1. The precise etymology remains to be established. Most scholars argue that the etymology can be traced even further to Latin creare (‘to create’); and others that it evolved via the Portuguese pidgin (criode) in Africa or via criado implying ‘an educated or deomesticated state as opposed to a savage or natural state’ (Condé 1998, p. 101). Yet despite these terminological and historical debates, it is clear that the first widespread use of the term was the Portuguese and Spanish crioulo/criollo.

2. These groupings are somewhat porous in that even some linguists of the second group who trace similarities among ‘creole’ languages to Portuguese pidgin or African substrata accept that at least some common features may be the result of bioprograms (Mühlhäuser 1986, pp. 6–12).

3. One exception to this rule was Fernando Ortiz's ‘transculturation’ concept (Ortiz 1970). This approach has numerous advantages over the creolization model including the fact that it was not born of colonial ideology and that it is more clearly defined.

4. He conceived of ‘all resident cultures as equal and contiguous, despite the accidents of political history, each developing its own life-style from the spirit of the ancestors, but modified – and increasingly so – through interaction with the environment, and the other cultures of the environment, until residence within the environment – nativization – becomes the process (creolization) through which all begin to share a style, even though that style will retain vestiges (with occasional nationalistic/cultural revivals back toward particular ancestors) of their original/ancestral heritage’ (Brathwaite 1977, p. 42).

5. Palmié describes African identities in the Americas as having undergone ‘a process of creolization (in the historical sense of becoming peculiar to the New World despite Old World origins) even before they could be passed on to people who were “creoles” by birth’ (Palmié 2004, 10n24, p. 26).

6. Noting its unique development in the Calabar region in relation to the Atlantic trade, Palmié concludes that ‘In the final analysis then, ekpe itself, in a sense, was an “Atlantic” – ‘“creole”, if you will – institution even before it arrived in Cuba’ (Palmié 2004, 26).

7. The Prince Regent also chose Richmond along with 17 other top fighters to be the honor guard at his coronation as George IV (Ford 1971, p. 71).

8. This conceptualization is indebted to Victor Manfredi, who dispels this illusory boundary in linguistic creolization. I am attempting here to apply his logic to the realm of culture (Manfredi 2004).

9. The kicking appears to have been predominantly stomping and shin kicking rather than circular or inverted Angolan-style kicking.

10. While their main arguments that the process of cultural synthesis that formed American cultures have much deeper histories is a crucial advance, even in these works the application of the term Creole to individuals is often flawed by a Euro-centric unidirectional double standard. Berlin uses the term Creole to mean a ‘Europeanized’ African who is to be contrasted with ‘pure/real’ Africans. This is made clear by the fact that a European trader, colonist, or missionary who learned African languages, in contrast, is never labeled a creole. Heywood (2002, p. 91) explicitly debunks the unidirectional nature of creolization in Angola by highlighting the importance of ‘the Africanization of Portuguese settlers and their culture, thus illustrating that creolization was not a process that only touched African culture and peoples’. Yet the numerous Europeans in Asia (Dalrymple 2002) or Africa (Heywood 2002) who ‘went native’ by adopting local languages and cultures are never labeled Creole. Even Thornton and Heywood's groundbreaking study (2007), does not consider intra-African hybridity in Africa to be creolization despite the dynamic process of cultural hybridization in Angolan communities such as Kisama, where thousands of refugees fleeing enslavement from diverse societies came together to form new a society or the itinerant Imbangala that assimilated captives from wherever their travels took them (Krug). It seems then that Europeans adopting African culture and languages, and Africans adopting other African cultures and languages do not qualify to be labeled Creole in these studies, reducing the scope of the term to mean an African assimilated to European culture.

11. Until recently the predominant association of the term ‘creole’ with people of African in Trinidad has helped elide the indigenization and contribution of Asian descended Trinidadians. Also, this selective use of the term often leaves Native American cultural interactions squarely out of the process of Americanization/Caribbeanization, despite the clear evidence to the contrary. Patricia Mohammed, ‘The “creolization” of Indian women in Trinidad’. In Verne Shpherd and glen L. Richards eds., Questioning creole: creolization discourses in Caribbean culture (Kingston, Jamaica: Randle Publishers, 2002), 130-147; Rhoda Reddock, ‘Contestations over culture, class, gender and identity in Trinidad and Tobago’. In Questioning creole, 111–129; David Buisseret, ‘Introduction’, 7–8. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, ‘Interrogating “Whiteness,” Complicating “‘Blackness”: Remapping American Culture’ American quarterly 47/3 (September 1995), 428–466.

12. Attempting to apply the term unilaterally to all ‘indigenized’ cultural forms would be fruitless. For example, it is hard to imagine that labeling Zen a ‘creole’ would add anything to our understanding of how this unique form of Buddhism was hybridized with Daoism in China and then thoroughly indigenized to the historical context of Japan.