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A Beautiful Fight examines the potentials and limits of capoeira Angola to cohere a multiracial community committed to antiracist struggle. Capoeira, a musical fight-game that originated among enslaved Africans in Brazil, holds special significance for Black Brazilian activists as a spiritual and political practice that affirms the value of Black lives, thus countering anti-Black violence sanctioned by the Brazilian state. However, many capoeira groups count more white practitioners than Black, especially groups of the politicized, Afrocentric style capoeira Angola, raising debates about appropriation of Black culture that resonate across the Americas. A Beautiful Fight addresses these tensions. Drawing on ethnographic research with a multiracial capoeira Angola group in Brazil’s Bahian sertão or backlands, Esther Viola Kurtz explores diverse group members’ understandings of capoeira’s spiritual and political meanings and considers how white participation impacts capoeira’s antiracist politics. A Beautiful Fight argues that white practitioners occupying space in capoeira divert attention from Black members’ concerns and reproduce racist and colonialist ideologies, albeit unintentionally. In this way, the book complicates claims that shared music and dance bridge differences and facilitate cross-racial unity, yet Kurtz proposes that capoeira still transmits knowledge and tools that, when used with intention, commitment, and care, can be wielded to collaboratively contest racism and imagine a more just world.
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Keywords
- African diasporic music and dance
- Afro-Brazilian dance
- Afro-Brazilian music
- Afro-Brazilian studies
- Afro-Latin American studies
- Ancestrality
- Antiracist resistance
- Axé energy
- Backland Bahia
- black studies
- Brazil
- capoeira
- Capoeira Angola
- coloniality
- critical ethnography
- cultural appropriation
- cultural politics
- dance studies
- Ethnomusicology
- Political Economy
- Racial politics
- Racist ideologies
- thema EDItEUR::A The Arts::AT Performing arts
- thema EDItEUR::A The Arts::AT Performing arts::ATD Theatre studies
- thema EDItEUR::A The Arts::AV Music::AVA Theory of music and musicology
- thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JB Society and culture: general::JBS Social groups, communities and identities::JBSL Ethnic studies
- whiteness
Links
DOI: 10.3998/mpub.12771665Editions