One Hundred and Twenty Ways to Read an Erased History

WHY THIS ARTICLE

This final article names the whole undertaking of the corpus: to open, from one doctoral thesis, a hundred and twenty distinct doors onto an erased history and an invisible technique.

Many doors, one thesis

Each of these articles is a door into a single work: a thesis on the effaced history and the invisible technique of capoeira and the Black combat arts. The championships and the manuals, the sporting arena and its verdicts, the reinventions of the contemporary form, the internal logic — the touch and the quasi-touch, the imbalances, the simulacrum, the continuous flow — and the family that runs from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean: each is a facet of one argument.

What the corpus does

To multiply the entries is not to dilute the thesis but to make it walkable. The reader enters where they will — through a fight, a figure, a paradox, a method — and finds, from any door, the same field: the Black combat arts, constituted as an object worthy of the analytic seriousness they were long denied.

Why it matters

A hundred and twenty readings of one thesis are a hundred and twenty ways to refuse an erasure. Together they hold open a field — and invite the reader to keep it open.

SOURCES

La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), thèse de doctorat, Université des Antilles, 2020 (title and general argument: the effaced history, the invisible technique, and the constitution of the field)

IN THE CORPUS

→ An Erased History, an Invisible Technique

→ The Family That Crosses Three Oceans

→ The Hips That Were Made a Racial Signature

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. One Hundred and Twenty Ways to Read an Erased History. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 120. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/one-hundred-and-twenty-ways-to-read-an-erased-history. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.