The Black Atlantic, Read Through the Body at Play

WHY THIS ARTICLE

The category 'Black combat arts' could be accused of flattening local specificities. The thesis situates it within Gilroy's Black Atlantic — a diasporic modernity — and weighs the risk openly.

A diasporic reading

The thesis draws on Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic — modernity and double consciousness — to think the Black combat arts as one field. To group the traditional combat games of African and enslaved origin, practised across the Americas and the Indian Ocean, under this name is to read a diaspora through the body at play: the same principles reappearing wherever the enslaved were carried.

The risk, weighed openly

The thesis poses the objection to itself: does the grouping not risk dissolving the local specificities of each game into a single category? The answer is methodological — the family is read through a shared internal logic, not imposed from above — but the question is left standing, as a question a serious reader must keep.

Why it matters

To name a field is a claim and a risk at once. The Black combat arts are offered as a diasporic unity that must continually justify itself against the local difference it gathers.

SOURCES

La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), thèse de doctorat, Université des Antilles, 2020 (General conclusion, drawing on P. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; the risk of the grouping).

IN THE CORPUS

→ A Game Where Everything and Its Opposite Coexist

→ The Family That Crosses Three Oceans

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. The Black Atlantic, Read Through the Body at Play. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 98. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/the-black-atlantic-read-through-the-body-at-play. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.