The talk investigates how the origins of Black performance can be ambiguous and move across the Atlantic. Focusing primarily on capoeira—an Afro-Brazilian combat game—I show how West African youth take up expressive forms in ways that question how Africans are positioned in the structure of diaspora. Far from representing a satisfying diasporic “return,” West African capoeira shows the disjointed process of Black performance repatriation that can reproduce social hierarchies. I argue that diaspora is both an aspiration and a framework for West Africans that can unexpectedly give way to renewed regional solidarities. I will then shift to the efforts of Black artists and activists recovering the African history of flamenco. This revival of Black origins in Spain coincides with the state’s attempt to control the “crisis” of African migration. Ultimately, I use capoeira and flamenco as two spaces that demonstrate how artistic heritage can be simultaneously problematic and a site of racial repair.
Bio: Celina de Sá is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and an affiliated faculty member in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department, the Tereza Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, and the Performance as Public Practice Program at the University of Texas at Austin. She earned her PhD with distinction at the University of Pennsylvania in Africana Studies and Anthropology. Dr. de Sá’s first book manuscript, Diaspora Without Displacement: The Coloniality and Promise of Capoeira in Senegal, is currently under contract with Duke University Press.