The Hips That Were Made a Racial Signature

WHY THIS ARTICLE

An identity-affirming claim can reproduce a colonial trope. The thesis notes that making the hips a racial signature echoes the very chroniclers who denigrated African dances.

A fourth part of the body

To the three parts said to compose the human being — head, trunk and limbs — Tavares added, for Black people, another element: the belt, the hips. He made this part of the body, the pelvis, a characteristic proper to the African people: the corpo-gestural identity of Black people, he wrote, is marked by the movement of the hips, carried as an inheritance by Black people and their descendants.

An uncomfortable echo

Would one not think, here, one heard the European chroniclers denigrating the African dances in which the pelvis described 'unnameable' movements? The thesis marks the discomfort: an affirmation of Black identity that reactivates, in reverse, a colonial trope about the racialised body.

Why it matters

To ground pride in a bodily essence can repeat the colonial gesture it means to answer. Making the hips a racial signature is affirmation and inherited trope at once.

SOURCES

La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), thèse de doctorat, Université des Antilles, 2020 (Part III: Tavares and the hips as a racial signature; cf. R. Marin, 2011)

IN THE CORPUS

→ The Diagram That Gave Black People the Basics and White People the Sport

→ The Genetics That Undid the Purity of Origins

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. The Hips That Were Made a Racial Signature. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 115. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/the-hips-that-were-made-a-racial-signature. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.