Swiping kicks across the Atlantic: Afro-Brazilian capoeira and Angolan combat games

• In Event: Media, Music, and Popular Culture

Abstract

Capoeira is one of the most successful contemporary forms of Afro-Brazilian popular culture. Developed from the marginalized practice of enslaved Africans it has expanded to new social groups in Brazil and more recently to new constituencies around the world. Contemporary capoeira groups often constitute global networks that communicate via facebook, youtube and other social media. Its African origins are subject of intense debates which have at their core the mythical "zebra dance" from southern Angola. This paper will present some results of a research project about combat games in that region and their eventual links with Brazilian popular culture. Despite the precarious survival throughout decades of civil war, these Angolan forms, may re-emerge and succeed to adapt to the ongoing modernization process if they can make these transatlantic links more visible and re-insert themselves into the globalized Black Atlantic. This is the aim of the project "The Angolan Roots of Capoeira" and the documentary film Body Games. Capoeira and Ancestry.

Author

• Matthias Röhrig Assunção, University of Essex