The Afro-Paradox: Diasporic Chauvinism and Cultural Expertise in Afro-Brazilian Capoeira

Abstract

Increasingly, Brazilian experts of capoeira—an Afro-Brazilian combat game—travel to African cities for an imagined return to the sites of capoeira's origins, as well as to train African students. Focusing on a cultural festival in Abidjan, I analyze capoeira cultural exchange events across West Africa through the anthropological lenses of expertise and racial analysis. These exchanges feature displays of Brazilian nationalism embodied by West African capoeira students, while they also reveal West Africans’ creative endeavors, such as constructing new capoeira songs in African languages. I demonstrate how the diasporic position to protect “Afro” cultural forms ironically gives way to policing creative work by continental Africans, capoeira's most recent recruits in the contemporary moment. I examine the racial hierarchies that proliferate within Black performance worlds through my concept of diasporic chauvinism to argue that diasporic returns can marginalize Africans and their innovations.