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...