An Erased History, an Invisible Technique

WHY THIS ARTICLE

The hundredth article closes the arc by naming the project itself: to make visible an erased history and an invisible technique, and to constitute the Black combat arts as a field.

Two erasures

The thesis takes its title from two erasures: a history effaced — the public championships, the manuals, the sporting arena, the reinventions, written out of the official account of a game that supposedly vanished at prohibition and was reborn intact in Bahia — and a technique rendered invisible, the internal logic that no surface study, centred on visible form, could see.

What is recovered

Against the first erasure, the archive: the 1905 championship, the manuals, the confrontations of 1928–1953, the reinventions of the contemporary form. Against the second, the internal logic: the touch and the quasi-touch, the positive and negative imbalances, the simulacrum, the continuous flow, the paradoxical principles — and, through them, the family of the Black combat arts, from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, whose geography espouses that of the deportations.

Why it matters

To recover an erased history and an invisible technique is not merely to correct a record. It is to constitute a field — the Black combat arts — and to give a diaspora's games the analytic seriousness they were denied.

SOURCES

La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), thèse de doctorat, Université des Antilles, 2020 (title and general argument: the effaced history and the invisible technique; the constitution of the Black combat arts as a field).

IN THE CORPUS

→ The Black Atlantic, Read Through the Body at Play

→ The Archives That Only See Capoeira When It Enters Public View

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. An Erased History, an Invisible Technique. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 100. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/an-erased-history-an-invisible-technique. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.