The jogo de capoeira and the fallacy of ‘creole’ cultural forms

In the early nineteenth century numerous enslaved Africans in Rio practiced the jogo de capoeira, a dynamic pugilistic game blending kicks and acrobatic defenses into a corporal chess like competition. Scholars typically frame this art form as a Brazilian ‘creole’ – a hybrid formed from an untraceable bricolage taken from all the kinesthetic repertoires of the hundreds of different African ethnicities represented among the enslaved population of Brazil. In this article, I demonstrate the degree to which ‘creole’ is an intellectually untenable category by comparing the trans-national histories of Rio de Janeiro's jogo de capoeira and New York City's boxing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The double standard revealed by this empirical analysis highlights that, contrary to claims that the creole concept somehow destabilizes racial absolutes, it is ultimately complicit in the reproduction of racial essentialism.