Coming to Voice Through Capoeira : Uncovering Ancestrality and Embodiments of the African Diaspora

Abstract: Capoeira is an African diasporic art form that developed in Brazil during the transatlantic slave trade. This research explores the history of Capoeira and its contemporary engagement through an autoethnographic method. It follows the first-hand experience of being a black female researcher and a Capoeirista both in Europe and Brazil. The purpose of engaging with this particular perspective was to recentre the ways in which we view Capoeira and its history, understanding that it has many embodiments of resistance that also include Black women. Embodiments here are framed as the embedded identities and corporeality affected by culture and society over several generations. Through this process, we open our awareness of further embodiments of the individual, together with that of the practice. Inspired by bell hooks' essay ‘Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness’, this thesis is a conversation between the past, the present and the future, it interrogates the popular structures in Capoeira that have been upheld or embodied and as a result has separated us from ancestral knowledge and knowledge of self. The ritual of Capoeira is mirrored throughout this thesis in order to engage with the intrinsic values of the practice and bring about transformative ways of seeing and moving in the world around us.