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Recent Scholarly and Popular Works on Capoeira

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LEARNING CAPOEIRA: LESSONS IN CUNNING FROM AN AFRO-BRAZILIAN ART. By DowneyGreg. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. 288. $49.00 cloth, $20.95 paper.)
CAPOEIRA AND CANDOMBLÉ: CONFORMITY AND RESISTANCE THROUGH AFRO-BRAZILIAN EXPERIENCE. By MerrellFloyd. (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2005. Pp. 360. $69.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.)
THE LITTLE CAPOEIRA BOOK. By CapoeiraNestor. Translated by LaddAlex. (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2005. Pp. 175. $15.95 paper.)

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2022

Joshua M. Rosenthal
Joshua M. Rosenthal*
Affiliation:
Western Connecticut State University
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Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 42 , Issue 2 , June 2007 , pp. 262 - 272
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 by the University of Texas Press

References

1. Bira Almeida, Capoeira: A Brazilian Art Form. History, Philosophy, and Practice (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1986). He has also written Água de beber, camará: Um bate-papo de Capoeira. (Em memoria de Mestre Bimba, capoeirista, educador e uma das mais expressivas manifestações do pensamento afro-brasileiro na Bahia). (Bahia: Empresa Gráfica da Bahia, 1999). Almeida often describes his path of learning capoeira in almost mystical terms. Almeida's influence goes beyond capoeira instruction, a reminder that a double flow between this culture form and academia as more scholars are influenced by the art's instruction and philosophy. See for example Elizabeth W. Kiddy's thanks to Acordeon in the acknowledgements of Blacks of the Rosary. Memory and History in Minas Gerais, Brazil (State College, PA: Penn State University Press, 2005). While the book does consider the nature and history of Afro-Brazilian culture there is no explicit link to capoeira, yet the author leaves little doubt about Almeida's influence.

2. Capoeira. Roots of the Dance Fight Game (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2002). Nestor Capoeira was originally a student of Leopoldinha and an early, though not original, member of Grupo Capoeira Senzala the single most influential association of Regionalistas. North Atlantic Books' dedication to publishing on the martial arts in general and capoeira is notable. They have published many of the general interest books in English and have more on the way. In addition to the book by Gerard Taylor discussed below, its sister press Frog Ltd./Blue Snake Books published another book by Taylor, Capoeira Conditioning: How to Build, Strength, Agility, and Cardiovascular Fitness Using Capoeira Movements in December of 2005.

3. An early manual of instruction by Lamartine Pereira da Costa, Capoeira sem mestre (Rio de Janeiro: Ecições de Ouro, 1962) contains similar diagrams reproduced in Nestor Capoeira's other book Capoeira Roots of the Dance Fight Game, 206.

4. The best is Barbara Browning's report on a conversation on the topic of the ‘Dance of the Zebra’, which is often referenced as the African root of capoeira, where a master observed, “The only ‘dance of the zebra’ I ever saw was in the zoo, and it was two zebras fucking.” Samba: Resistance in Motion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 123.

5. The four page foreword in this study by Robert Farris Thompson alone is worth reading where he sketches the wider culture context before ending with fitting eloquence, “of all the martial arts of the Black Atlantic world, capoeira is supreme.”

6. An admirable choice considering that Downey is quite capable of plumbing the historical record as demonstrated in his article, “Domesticating an Urban Menace: Reforming Capoeira as a Brazilian National Sport,” in The International Journal of the History of Sport, 19 (4) (December 2002): 1–32, one of the more insightful inquiries into capoeira's simultaneously marginalized and celebrated history that is not cited in other works often enough.

7. Downey has explored this approach before in his Ph.D. dissertation and an article, “Listening to Capoeira: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and the Materiality of Music,” Ethnomusicology, 46 (3) 487–509.

9. It does not seem coincidental that Rörhig Assuncão and Gerard Taylor, who both confront issues of history directly, are coming from traditions outside of the United States. The influences of the U.S. discourses about identity have influenced this discussion in Brazil but those working in other settings seem freer to engage the topic directly. In particular Rörhig Assuncão's challenges to stories of African origins which Taylor discusses in an appendix are the kind of point that U.S. progressives phrase very carefully if they make them in public at all. Scholars from other traditions are less bound by these concerns. There are for example the points made by Livio Sansone, a scholar of Italian origin, in his study Blackness without Ethnicity: Constructing Race in Brazil (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2003) on the nature of racial identity in Brazil, with reference to Suriname and the Netherlands. It is hard to imagine a scholar from the U.S. academy making a comparison between ethnic relations in Brazil and Europe. For a look at thoughtful work by a U.S. scholar engaging with this dynamic, see France Winddance Twine's ethnography, Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998).

10. A large part of the literature on capoeira from the last decade is by historians. An article by Maya Talmon Chvaicer, “The Criminalization of Capoeira in Nineteenth-Century Brazil,” Hispanic American Historical Review 82 (3) (August 2002) offers a nuanced examination of how the practice of capoeira changed in the nineteenth century. An influential article documenting the link between capoeira and defined criminality is Thomas Holloway, “‘A Healthy Terror’: Police Repression of Capoeiras in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 69: 4 (December 1989). The most extensive use of judicial records for examining this history is found in two books by Carlos Eugênio Líbano Soares examining topics ranging from the ethnic origins of African Capoeiristas to the neighborhoods of various maltas or gangs, to the links with politicians, first in A negredada instituição. Os Capoeiras no Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Coleçao Biblioteca Carioca, 1998) and A capoeira escrava. E outras tradições rebeldes no Rio de Janeiro (1808–1850) (Rio de Janeiro: Editora da Unicamp, 2001). The second of these works is discussed in the essay by Hendrick Kraay, “Transatlantic Ties: Recent Works on the Slave Trade, Slavery and Abolition,” Latin American Research Review, 39: 2 (178–195).

8. The one author writing on capoeira in English who has not trained as far as I know is C. Daniel Dawson whose work includes, “Capoeira Angola and Mestre João Grande,” in a collection sold by the International Capoeira Angola Foundation of Washington D.C., and liner notes from Capoeira Angola from Salvador, Brazil, compact disc, Smithsonian/Folkways Recordings SFW 40465.

11. A bit of context on Bahia in this era shows that capoeira was far from the only cultural practice that was being made new with an emphasis on original practices and with the intellectual guidance of figures like Edison Carneiro. For a discussion of these events, and a reminder of how much distance the literature on capoeira has to travel to equal the literature on its sibling practices see Luis Nicolau Parés, “The ‘Nagôization’ Process in Bahian Candomblé,” in Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs, eds., The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).

12. Here Merrell adds to the tradition of nonverbal representation like Nestor's historic pictures or Thomas J. Desch-Obi's provocative representations of Angolan ritual symbols. In spirit they seem closest to Lowell Lewis' intimidatingly technical drawings of movement and play. Merrell explains figure 18 on page 241 by differentiating between “A,” “not-A,” “A-lessness,” and “Not-A-lessness.” Desch-Obi's article, “Combat and the crossing of the Kalunga,” is a forceful argument for capoeira's African origins based in part of field work in Central Africa, in Linda M. Heywood, ed., Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 253–70). This work is also reviewed in Kraay, “Transatlantic Ties,” LARR 39 (2).