departure. He established, unsurprisingly, that these are all present in capoeira Angola, which can therefore
be identified as an ‘African art form’.^89 At this level academic ‘research’ on capoeira history becomes
tautological and confined to the mere reiteration of myths.
For these defenders of ‘wild’ Afrocentrism, it is important not only to highlight the African character of
capoeira, but also to downplay the transformations the art might have undergone in Brazil. In its most
extreme formulation, capoeira thus appears as an entirely African manifestation, taken by Angolan slaves to
Brazil, rescued in the 1980s and now spreading among African Americans of the diaspora (see the Nardi
quote at beginning of this chapter). In that view, black US citizens have thus more legitimate claims
regarding the ‘property’ of capoeira than white, middle-class Brazilians who only contributed to ‘de-
characterizing’ the original art. Needless to say that this clashes frontally with what many Brazilians think
about capoeira. Ultimately this is a struggle over which group is more ‘entitled’ to re-appropriate capoeira:
diasporic blackness or Brazilian national identity. Although these master narratives appear totally
incompatible, I would argue that an examination of the issue of creolization in capoeira can provide a
middle ground for a more consensual narrative.
Just as the Eurocentric or Brazilian nationalist discourses, in opposition to which it tends to define itself,
the Afrocentric narrative can equally become one-sided in its approach. The over-emphasisis on capoeira’s
African-ness tends to essentialize history into binary categories opposing, for example, good Africans and
bad Europeans. It also tends to homogenize the continent and freeze its culture in a pre-modern and non-
Western state of authenticity. Culture is perceived in terms of biological analogies and fixed geographical
locations, paradoxically reproducing the same underlying grammar of the colonialist discourse. The
negative sign attributed to all things African is inverted, but it runs the risk of reinstating old discourses
under the same premises and falling into analogous essentialisms. The extreme Afrocentric narrative
depends thus more than it would like to admit on the discourses it wants to reject to maintain its consistency.
This view also depends on a notion of culture as static, referring it always to ‘authentic’ roots that lie in the
past, regarding purity as more relevant than transformations. As culture here also has much to do with
identity formations, essentialist views, independently of where they are located, it will tend to be more
exclusive than inclusive.
Essentialism of all kinds easily leads to fundamentalism. For the same reason many white supremacists
condemned (and still condemn) miscegenation; fundamentalist Afrocentrics have only contempt for
hybridity, perceived as intrinsically negative. In that more restricted meaning Afrocentrism stands for an
ideology of extreme cultural nationalism, ‘accompanied by a mass of invented traditions, by a mythical
vision of the past, and by a body of racial pseudoscience’.^90 It has reached its most extreme formulations in
the contemporary, pseudoscientific melanin narratives promoting the idea of black superiority.^91
Another approach, as suggested for instance by James Clifford, opens a different venue to think these
processes:
If we rethink culture and its science, anthropology, in terms of travel, then the organic, naturalizing
bias of the term culture—seen as a rooted body that grows, lives, dies, etc.—is questioned.
Constructed and disputed historicities, sites of displacements, interference, and interaction, come
more sharply into view.^92This shift of the notion of culture from the ‘naturalizing bias’ to the metaphor of travel is the more relevant
when studying diasporic cultures, as their very origin lies in the journey, in the historical experience of
displacement and uprooted-ness. Stuart Hall points out that
26 COMPETING MASTER NARRATIVES