Capoeira Was Reinvented Again and Again to Serve the Nation

WHY THIS ARTICLE

Capoeira's changes are read as organic evolution. The thesis reads them as reinventions serving the construction of national identity — a technique with real power to slow or reverse the body's own evolution.

A game reshaped by discourse

Through the study of technical manuals and a 'participant observation', the thesis showed that capoeira, across the twentieth century, was ceaselessly reinvented to serve the construction of national identity. Sporting, military or folkloric, it put on new attributes to accord with the dominant discourse on brasilidade. That discourse of the intellectual and cultural elites held a real coercive power over the bodily technique itself — capable of slowing, or entirely refusing, its evolution, and of plunging it decades backward.

The limits of the elites' power

Yet, given the constant inventiveness of practitioners, the new stakes assigned by younger generations, and the plurality of styles, schools and masters, this moderating power of the elites was limited in time and space. The research showed both the concrete materialisation of political projects conceived upstream and their restricted potential before the complexity of capoeira as a social field.

Why it matters

Capoeira's history is neither pure organic growth nor pure top-down manipulation. It is the tension between projects imposed from above and a game too plural to be fully governed.

SOURCES

La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), thèse de doctorat, Université des Antilles, 2020 (on capoeira reinvented across the twentieth century for national identity; capoeira as a social field).

IN THE CORPUS

→ Contemporary Capoeira Is Neither Carioca nor Bahian

→ The 'Traditional' Capoeira Was Invented by the 'Modern' One

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. Capoeira Was Reinvented Again and Again to Serve the Nation. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 99. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/capoeira-was-reinvented-again-and-again-to-serve-the-nation. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.