Capoeira as a Postcolonial Art

WHY THIS ARTICLE

Capoeira's political turn is read as recent activism grafted onto an apolitical game. The thesis situates it: a late-century birth of capoeira as a postcolonial art, mirror of a suffering society.

Echoing the racial question

At the beginning of the 1980s, capoeira echoed the racial questions reactivated in Brazilian society a few years earlier. The groups Senzala and Olodum are the best reflection at once of contemporary capoeira and the mirror of its limits within a Brazilian society in suffering — a country presented as a racial democracy but which, in fact, discriminated against Black people socially, politically and culturally.

A new function

From this awareness emerged, within the field of capoeira, a reflection on the place of Black people in the game and in society — the birth of capoeira as a postcolonial art, in the service of the defence of the rights of Afro-descendants. The two entities promoted this turn with sincerity, passion and engagement.

Why it matters

Capoeira's political vocation is not a foreign graft but a datable birth at the century's end — the game becoming a postcolonial instrument as Brazil's racial democracy was put in question.

SOURCES

La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), thèse de doctorat, Université des Antilles, 2020 (Part III, C: the emergence of capoeira as a postcolonial art; Senzala and Olodum in the 1980s).

IN THE CORPUS

→ When Capoeira Became a Weapon in a War of Black and White

→ The Genetics That Undid the Purity of Origins

→ Capoeira on the Cover of Black Belt

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. Capoeira as a Postcolonial Art. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 78. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/capoeira-as-a-postcolonial-art. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.