Skip to page navigation menu Skip entire header
Brown University
Skip 13 subheader links

Moving and Sounding Towards Freedom: Capoeira Angola As a Practice of Afro-Brazilian Racial Consciousness

Description

Abstract:
This dissertation examines how practitioners of capoeira Angola develop sensory knowledge as a mode of racial politics. The ethnographic study focuses on master-teacher Mestre Cláudio’s Angoleiros do Sertão (capoeira Angola practitioners of the Backlands), a group centered in Feira de Santana, Bahia, Brazil. A centuries-old Afro-Brazilian music and movement form, capoeira Angola passes on the strategies developed by enslaved Africans and their descendants to achieve freedom. Citing this history, practitioners claim their practice as a form of social activism that sustains resistance to white, colonial oppression. Through training music, sounds and movement, practitioners embody ancestral lessons and expand both their physical abilities and their consciousness. Centering their sensory experience, I ask how practitioners who inhabit diverse positionalities shift their understandings of self, race, community and politics as a result of their practice. While capoeira Angola valorizes black Brazilian identity, capoeira communities still perpetuate to varying degrees the sexist and racist exclusions of dominant Brazilian society. Examining the limits of this cultural movement to contribute to broader projects of black freedom, I ask how and for whom capoeira serves as a practice of freedom, and whether it is differently liberatory for men and women, or for black and white participants. I approach these questions by including voices largely absent in existing capoeira scholarship, from marginalized, black youth in the Northeast to middle-class, white educators in the Southeast of Brazil. I also underscore how Afro-Brazilian women activists have profoundly shaped the capoeira community’s political consciousness. Drawing on fieldwork conducted from 2013 through 2017, in which I trained alongside the capoeira students, I have integrated methods from music and dance studies in order to develop approaches for analyzing simultaneous sound and movement. Recognizing sensory ways of knowing as central in practices of the African diaspora, I also expand conceptions of Africana political theory to include the thinking produced in African diasporic sonic and bodily expressions. Ultimately, I argue that capoeira Angola’s political potential lies in its mobilization of the Afro-Brazilian past, through sounding, moving bodies in the present, in order to construct an alternative, Afrocentric future.
Notes:
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2018

Access Conditions

Rights
In Copyright
Restrictions on Use
Collection is open for research.

Citation

Kurtz, Esther Viola, "Moving and Sounding Towards Freedom: Capoeira Angola As a Practice of Afro-Brazilian Racial Consciousness" (2018). Music Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://doi.org/10.26300/bwha-f525

Relations

Collection: