Capoeira - a game of combat primarily developed by enslaved West Central Africans - has become an icon of both Brazilian national culture and pride in the country's diasporic African heritage. Yet the sport remains less accessible in Africa itself, overshadowed in large part by participants in the Global North. In Diaspora Without Displacement, Celina de SA tells the story of capoeira as it 'returns' to the African continent through the creative initiatives of young urban professionals in Senegal. De SA demonstrates how a new generation of African capoeiristas are taking up their own Afro-diasporic performance tradition, effectively reframing notions of diaspora and race through their social practice. Though capoeira has largely Angolan roots, and the agents of return are typically white Brazilians and Europeans, the West African practitioners de SA documents nonetheless form an exceptional relationship to capoeira that, in turn, becomes a mode of political and social consciousness. Drawing on ethnographic research in Senegal as well as analyzing a capoeira network across West Africa, de SA shows how urban West Africans use capoeira to explore the relationship between Blackness, diaspora, and African heritage.
Celina de SA is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.
"In Diaspora Without Displacement, Celina de SA reconfigures the African diaspora by redeploying the performative strategies of 'Brazilian' capoeira as a critical ethnographer and skilled participant. Focusing on capoeira in Senegal, she flips Afro-Atlantic geographies of historical origins and historic returns to decolonize what she calls 'diasporic chauvinism.' Throughout this bold intervention, the combat game of capoeira serves less as an object of analysis than the analytic through which misrecognized histories of Blackness emerge and are reclaimed - a radical provocation sure to generate lively debate." - Andrew Apter, author of Oduduwa's Chain: Locations of Culture in the Yoruba-Atlantic "In this fascinating book Celina de SA shows how through the Afro-Brazilian combat game of capoeira, postcolonial urban West Central African youth articulate themselves as Black subjects while also making, creating, and practicing diaspora without ever traveling to Brazil. By expanding the meaning of diaspora by centering it within an African context that challenges the necessity of displacement, this groundbreaking book will productively disrupt how scholars think of diaspora for years to come." - Yolanda Covington-Ward, author of Gesture and Power: Religion, Nationalism, and Everyday Performance in Congo
