Reading Capoeira from Rio, Against a Century of Bahia

WHY THIS ARTICLE

Scholarship made Bahia the centre of capoeira's history. The thesis deliberately inverts the focus to Rio — and, with rare honesty, questions the limits of its own inversion.

A deliberate inversion

The thesis reads the first half of the twentieth century centred on Rio, against a research tradition centred on Bahia. This inversion allows one to move past a regional history presented as generalisable to the whole country — but the thesis asks the reflexive question in turn: does the inversion not risk substituting one regional history, presented as national, for another?

Honesty about method

The move is not offered as a new dogma. Centred on Rio and its press, the account is as tributary to its sources as the Bahian tradition was to its own. To invert the focus is to gain a corrective, not a complete truth — and the thesis says so.

Why it matters

The strongest revision is the one that doubts itself. To shift the centre from Bahia to Rio corrects a bias without pretending to have escaped the problem of the partial view.

SOURCES

La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), thèse de doctorat, Université des Antilles, 2020 (General conclusion: the Rio-centred inversion and its self-critique).

IN THE CORPUS

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

→ How Bahia and Capoeira Became the Same Word

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. Reading Capoeira from Rio, Against a Century of Bahia. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 96. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/reading-capoeira-from-rio-against-a-century-of-bahia. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.