Black Combat Arts Institute.
PHILOSOPHICAL & SOCIO-HISTORICAL
Black Creolisation
Cultural objects produced by a double process of creolisation — original and continuous — whose identity is Black.
The Black combat arts are not African survivals frozen in the Americas, nor colonial inventions without a past. They are the product of a double creolisation: an original one — the matrix of the slave societies, where peoples, techniques and musics were forced into contact and produced new games; and a continuous one — each generation, each port, each circle re-creolising the inheritance with what its present offers, from the batuque courtyard to the academy. Naming this creolisation “Black” is not a detail: it names the peoples who bore the process, the worlds that produced it, and the identity that its erasure has so often targeted. The family's unity is not a common origin — it is a common process.
IN THE SYSTEM
→ Tradition of Innovation — Traditions whose very content is innovation: the Black combat arts transmit, as heritage, the obligation to invent.
→ Destructive Recognition — The recognition that destroys what it honours — praised into disappearance.
IN THE CORPUS
→ Capoeira Is Not Alone in the World
HOW TO CITE THIS CONCEPT
MALO, Olivier. Black Creolisation. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Concepts [online]. 2026. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/concepts-en/black-creolisation [accessed date].