Promoting Capoeira, Branding Brazil: A Focus on the Semantic Body

At a summer festival in a major North American city, a dozen boys and girls, young adults all, are wearing white pants, standing in a circle, clapping hands, and singing in Portuguese. One pair in the middle of the circle seems to kick each other without really striking, dodging one another's feet with acrobatic and seemingly deliberately aestheticized movements. Once the pair stops, the group leader--a muscular dark-skinned man--explains to the gathering spectators that what they have just seen is called capoeira, a Brazilian martial art that was created by African slaves in Brazil as a form of resistance to colonial authorities. As he speaks, some of the practitioners give out flyers on which the main feature is a gorgeous blue-eyed, blond-haired young woman, who is, in fact, a capoeira student from the group doing the presentation. The historical explanation given by the mestre (the group leader and an expert practitioner) seems at odds with the setting of the festival, the image used on the promotional flyers, and the trendy allure of the members of the group. On the other hand, the appeal of this performance might very well have been amplified by this mysterious underground history, authenticated by the leader's "blackbody" that recalls the origins of the practice in slavery and his foreign accent that reveals his own Brazilian heritage. A number of paradoxical elements are at play in this scene. Together they point to the long route that capoeira has traveled: what started out as a practice of resistance is now a fashionable activity available worldwide. Indeed, this article works under the assumption that capoeira's exportation outside of Brazil was made possible by the practice's (partial) commodification, allowing it to circulate in a global culture industry as a product available for consumption. Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, immigrating Brazilians brought their practice with them and many commercialized their embodied knowledge and specialized expertise, making it the basis of their livelihood (Robitaille 2013). Such globalization of capoeira has recontextualized it, unsettling both its relationship to its immediate national settings and its underlying socioeconomic and racial connotations. These associations are, however, put to use in the way capoeira is presented, marketed, received, and consumed in the global culture industries. This article explores how capoeira's circulation in North American markets and the diverse ways that mestres promote it shift the valuations attached to the practice and modify its meanings with respect to notions of race. In particular, I explore various disjunctures between representation and embodiment related to the globalization and commodification of capoeira and the various contradictions and possibilities that result. Not the least of these is the way that embodied knowledge in the context of a commercialized teaching of expressive culture unsettles and further complicates understandings of race and of cross-cultural exchange/appropriation. With the globalization of capoeira, various aspects of the practice are altered and made into something readily consumable, thus necessarily resignified. My central concern here is one vital element in this process: the capoeirista's body. Capoeira is continually manifest and actualized through the bodies of its practitioners. There are important continuities between the meanings circulating now via capoeiristas' bodies and the historical narratives that were attached to the bodies of African descendants in Brazil: the complex racial politics and the ensuing social attitudes toward the Afro-Brazilian population in Brazil still inform the interpretations of capoeira that circulate globally in various culture industries even though some semantic shifts and ruptures happen as the practice opens up to new populations worldwide. In the following pages, I examine the meanings attached to and articulated through capoeiristas' bodies in order to discuss the varied fields of value and the shifting valuations of capoeira in the North American "culturescape. …