How Capoeira Became A National Folk Form

“As elaborate and beautiful as capoeira itself! Drawing on interviews, manuals, sketches, photographs, and embodied knowledge, and highlighting the authorship of often overlooked actors, Staging Brazil demonstrates that capoeira elides and eludes the binaries purity/mixture, tradition/modernity, authentic/staged, angola/regional, and black/white.”
—Patricia de Santana Pinho, author of Mapping Diaspora: African American Roots Tourism in Brazil

Capoeira is an Afro-Brazilian combat game practiced today throughout the world. Staging Brazil: Choreographies of Capoeira is the first in-depth study of the process of legitimization of capoeira and its globalization as Brazil’s national folklore. Using early illustrated capoeira manuals, the book contextualizes the two main styles of capoeira, angola and regional, within discourses of race and nation in mid-twentieth century Brazil and reveals the mutual influences between capoeira practitioners, tourism bureaucrats, intellectuals, artists, and directors of folkloric ensembles.

Ana Paula Höfling is an assistant professor of dance at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She splits her time between North Carolina and Brazil.

“As elaborate and beautiful as capoeira itself! Drawing on interviews, manuals, sketches, photographs, and embodied knowledge, and highlighting the authorship of often overlooked actors, Staging Brazil demonstrates that capoeira elides and eludes the binaries purity/mixture, tradition/modernity, authentic/staged, angola/regional, and black/white.” —Patricia de Santana Pinho, author of Mapping Diaspora: African American Roots Tourism in Brazil

“In this tour-de-force of painstaking archival work and theoretical sophistication, Höfling brings capoeira alive as a crucial area of study for understanding the role of bodies and movement in post-colonial nation-building.” —Jane C. Desmond, author of Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World

“This book is at once a fine biography of capoeira in its kinesthetic specificities and a necessary examination of the narratives that sustain the invention of a modern Brazil . . . it is a valuable addition to a growing body of work that challenges us to see beyond staged and authentic, loss and retention dichotomies.” —Bianca Freire-Medeiros, author of Touring Poverty

“Staging Brazil represents an important contribution to dance studies, martial arts studies, and Brazilian history . . . Rejecting false binaries of tradition versus innovation and Brazilian versus African, Höfling emphasizes choreographic authorship not as a sign of decline but as fundamental to capoeira. Meticulously researched and clearly articulated, Staging Brazil nuances understandings of capoeira by treating modernity and choreographic authorship as central to its practice.” —Janet O’Shea, author of Risk, Failure, Play: What Dance Reveals about Martial Arts Training

June 4, 2019
280 pp., 40 illus., 6 x 9”
Unjacketed Cloth, $85.00x  978-0-8195-7880-8
Paper, $26.95 978-0-8195-7881-5
eBook, $21.99 Y 978-0-8195-7882-2