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At a summer festival in a major North American city, a dozen boys and girls, young adults all, are wearing white pants, standing in a circle, clapping hands, and singing in Portuguese. One pair in the middle of the circle seems to kick each other without really striking, dodging one another's feet with acrobatic and seemingly deliberately aestheticized movements. Once the pair stops, the group leader-a muscular dark-skinned man-explains to the gathering spectators that what they have just seen is called capoeira, a Brazilian martial art that was created by African slaves in Brazil as a form of resistance to colonial authorities. As he speaks, some of the practitioners give out flyers on which the main feature is a gorgeous blue-eyed, blond-haired young woman, who is, in fact, a capoeira student from the group doing the presentation. The historical explanation given by the mestre (the group leader and an expert practitioner) seems at odds with the setting of the festival, the image used on the promotional flyers, and the trendy allure of the members of the group. On the other hand, the appeal of this performance might very well have been amplified by this mysterious underground history, authenticated by the leader's "black body" that recalls the origins of the practice in slavery and his foreign accent that reveals his own Brazilian heritage.
A number of paradoxical elements are at play in this scene. Together they point to the long route that capoeira has traveled: what started out as a practice of resistance is now a fashionable activity available worldwide. Indeed, this article works under the assumption that capoeira's exportation outside of Brazil was made possible by the practice's (partial) commodification, allowing it to circulate in a global culture industry as a product available for consumption. Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, immigrating Brazilians brought their practice with them and many commercialized their embodied knowledge and specialized expertise, making it the basis of their livelihood (Robitaille 2013). Such globalization of capoeira has recontextualized it, unsettling both its relationship to its immediate national settings and its underlying socioeconomic and racial connotations. These associations are, however, put to use in the way capoeira is presented, marketed, received, and consumed in the global culture industries. This...