States teachers have even decided to instruct exclusively African-Americans. The specificity of
‘race-relations’ and segregation thus has an impact on the way capoeira is practised in the United States.
In general terms, however, globalized capoeira tends to be all-inclusive. Maybe even more than in Brazil,
the capoeira classroom has provided, from Stockholm to Sidney and from Boston to Barcelona, a space
where class, ethnic, gender and cultural differences are played out and renegotiated. My experience from
groups in Berlin, Paris and London suggests that capoeira is particularly attractive to people from
multicultural backgrounds, who are in search of a cultural form that can accommodate their own diversity.
Growing mutual respect for otherness and understanding of cultural differences is therefore an important
outcome of capoeira in this new context. As in Brazil, capoeira can thus operate as a school of citizenship
for its practitioners.
Senzala co-founder Gil Velho suggested that capoeira always adapts to new contexts, and that therefore,
necessarily, the gestures and the body language will evolve accordingly.^123 In that case it might well be that
capoeira in Europe or in the United States will thus one day become European and United States capoeira,
and that individual groups will develop styles that correspond to the aesthetics, life-styles and world-views
of their specific audiences. One example of this is the kalunga paradigm adopted by some United States
capoeiristas. According to a theory developed by Afro-centric authors, ‘the cosmic circle as a means of
entering the spirit world’ constitutes the ‘underlying Central African concept’ of capoeira. For them playing
capoeira is thus a way to cross the kalunga, the border between the living and the dead, and ‘ritually mirror
the ancestors’.^124 As we have seen in Chapters 3 and 4, that meaning is unheard of in the traditions of
Brazilian capoeira and so far alien to Brazilian practice. The kalunga paradigm thus constitutes a
development that is at present specific to some capoeira circles in the United States.
Capoeira in a global context still provides identity. Despite its use as an African or Afro Brazilian
symbol, its globalized practice is, in most cases, no longer linked to a specific class or ethnic group but
rather to the feeling of encompassing resistance against oppression, or ‘the system’. It seems to offer the
advantage of immediate benefits allied to long-term goals. Capoeira has thus become not only a global
style, but also part of a globalized subculture of protest, to both of which the African diaspora has already made
other substantial contributions through R&B, salsa, samba, soca, reggae and Rastafarianism. Together with
other creole arts of the Black Atlantic, capoeira seems thus particularly able to provide the means and the
language for an unconformist posture.
Since World War II, this kind of attitude has been labelled as ‘cool’. The term originally derives from the
aesthetics and attitudes of black jazz and blues musicians in the United States, who used it to describe their
way of defending themselves against racial oppression. By making a virtue of their exclusion, they found a
way to re-affirm their own values against the dominant white, mainstream culture. The term has become more
and more popular over the last decades. Some observers suggested that coolness is the answer to a
fundamental contradiction of our everyday life. It enables people to reconcile the cultural revolution of the
1960s with the neo-liberal revolution of the 1980s: subjecting oneself to the harsh requirements of global
capitalism in an eight-hour-a-day job and spending evenings and weekends indulging in sex, drugs and
Rock’n Roll. Dick Pountain and David Robins have described the cool attitude ‘as being constructed from
four principal personality traits: detachment, narcissism, irony and hedonism’.^125
All four attitudes apply well to capoeira. Detachment is trained and acquired when practitioners learn not
to over-react in a game but to accept that they have been momentarily caught, or when they train to gaze
into the empty space beyond their opponent. The permanent work with one’s own body easily favours
bodybuilding attitudes of narcissism, reflected in miles of video footage and tons of negatives produced at
every capoeira encounter. Irony is developed through the game and the improvisation of capoeira songs that
deal with the situation in the roda. The aim of training in capoeira is to excel at the game, and playing
CONTEMPORARY CAPOEIRA 191