Although there are numerous cultural connections linking Cuba and Brazil through the Black Atlantic, surprisingly little has been written about the similarities in performance between the two countries beyond simply acknowledging similar ethnic makeup.[1] In most parts of the world, the capoeira diaspora has been expanded since the 1980s by Brazilian mestres travelling abroad and opening new capoeira schools. In the Cuban context, however, no capoeira mestre ever arrived with the sole purpose of opening a capoeira academy. When capoeira arrived in Cuba in the 1990s, through Brazilian telenovelas and through student-capoeiristas studying at universities in Havana, Cuban practitioners connected capoeira to their own lived experiences and sense of Cuban identity. Learning to embody and relocalize Brazilian capoeira has created an incentive for a reencounter with their Afro Cuban traditions. As the last societies to abolish slavery in the Americas, Cuba and Brazil (1886 and 1888, respectively) have both engaged in historic cultural discourse around the integration of a large African Diaspora into the concept of a national identity.

El contrapunto histórico entre africanos, cubanos, y brasileños tuvo lugar, a nivel simbólico, en los relatos contados a ambos lados del Atlántico, que así conforman una cuenca épica. Esos lugares comunes del imaginario afro-románico sobrevivieron gracias a los continuos intercambios entre América y África. (Leo 142)

The capoeira practiced in Cuba today is not only a recent phenomenon of globalization, but is an ongoing reconfiguration of the circular movement of ideas, people, and practices that emerged in the New World and has continued into the present. National consciousness is an imagined expression of “people” in its collective form. In both Cuba and Brazil this imagining played itself out in the realm of performance. The myths and icons of nationality in Cuba and Brazil, often embodied through the mulato or creole figure, personified the social inversions, hybrid cultures, and the violence of colonialism.

Contextualizing Capoeira

In the words of Floyd Merrel, to define what capoeira is, it is necessary to define it by saying what it is not (2003, 279). It is not just a Brazilian martial art, although its characteristics are very martial and its history is in self-defense. It is not a musical tradition, although all the movements follow a distinctive rhythm and capoeiristas (capoeira players) must learn to be equally skilled on the berimbau, atabaque, pandeiro, agogô, and reco-reco. It is not a dance, although many moves are so fluid and graceful that you would think that the players were dancing. And it is not a ritual, although the roda of capoeira (the place where capoeira is performed) follows the traditional characteristics of ritual in that there are predetermined and symbolic actions that reoccur in a particular environment and sacred space.  Capoeira is all of these things and none of these things. And this enigma has been what has drawn practitioners and helped preserve this art form for hundreds of years.

Although capoeira is a Brazilian art form, it has origins in different dances and martial traditions of Africa. The Angolan martial arts n’golo, basula, and gabetula may have been influences in the creation of capoeira. It may also have picked up elements of West African culture such as the use of the agogô instrument and references to Yoruba orixás (sacred deities of nature in the African religion). (McGowan 118) Mathias Assunção explains that history is paramount in contemporary capoeira through the invocation of its historical roots and its performative reenactments of the resistance techniques used by the first practitioners of capoeira who were living under oppressive institutions. “The belief in the remote origins of the art, coupled with the conviction that an unaltered ‘essence’ of capoeira has been transmitted from that foundational moment down to the present, confers greater authority to contemporary practice, and is therefore shared by many practitioners” (McGowan 5).

Some of the first documentation of capoeira is among enslaved Africans and Creoles in colonial Brazil as early as the 18^th century. Despite periodic clampdowns by the police, the martial art continued to spread to the free underclasses in Brazilian cities throughout the nineteenth centuries (Assunção 1). While many of these legends come from the rural setting of capoeira during plantation life, much of capoeira’s development actually took place in the urban centers where there was obviously a tension between public authority figures and lower class Blacks (Chvaicer 546).  The fact that the performance of a historical past is at the very core of the game of capoeira means that its past has serious implications for its current practice in global settings worldwide. In the case of Cuba, practitioners are able to draw parallels with their own Cuban performative traditions of resistance, feeling a connection to capoeira’s history through a circum-Caribbean dialogue.

Capoeira in Cuba

The few foreigners who have come to Cuba and have made their mark on the capoeira community have not stayed in Cuba to create a new diaspora, rather they have been part of transnational flows, coming and going for brief periods of time over the years. Capoeira in Cuba has developed through sporadic encounters with these foreigners (who are mostly not Brazilian nor capoeira mestres) who come to the island for short periods of study or tourism and, in periods of their absence, Cubans continue training by improvising movements learned through studying the CDs, DVDs, books, or flash drives of capoeira music and videos left behind by these visitors. As Cubans inevitably learn about capoeira’s historical myths through playing capoeira and through media that has been left for them, Cuban players begin to find similarities with their own Cuban experiences of resistance to oppressive systems from their remembered historical past and from their present conditions.

Derrida argues and Stuart Hall elaborates that identity formation can be captured by the term, différance. According to Derrida, this term can refer to both French verbs “to differ” and “to defer.” Not only does identity describe a difference, but also characteristics of identity are often “deferred” or “postponed” as we focus on the more sounding likenesses. This creates bonds of commonality.[2]  The capoeirista historically has embodied this idea of différance. During times of slavery, traditions of different tribes and African nations were melded and incorporated into a system of resistance made solely for the context of the New World. As players and the game developed, this différance was reoriented to unite people of different social classes, ethnicities, countries, and languages. Today Cuban capoeiristas defer what may be seen as differences in Cuban and Brazilian cultures and instead focus on their imagined likenesses.  Capoeira evokes the struggles of resistance of Afro Brazilians throughout history and holds the healing powers to confront injustices committed against a group so often overlooked and forgotten. The processes of transculturation and globalization then make it so that the transformative powers of capoeira performance are not confined to a solely Brazilian experience; Cuban capoeiristas are able to connect its history to their own present and historical struggles, both real and imagined.

Transnationalism is defined as “the flow of people, ideas, goods and capital across national territories in a way that undermines nationality and nationalism as discrete categories of identification, economic organization, and political constitution” (Braziel and Mannur 8). Transnationalism is often talked about in parallel with diaspora; however, diaspora refers specifically to the flow of people. The arrival of capoeira in Cuba is transnational but it is not diasporic since there has not been a relocation of Brazilian mestres or Brazilian capoeira academies to Cuba. Cuban capoeiristas, thus, are processing their capoeira training through their own lived experiences in Cuba. The processing of capoeira through a Cuban lens, however, is an example of an African diasporic connection. In Cuba, as in Brazil, the ritualized violence of social inversion is an important allegory of national culture. According to Jossianna Arroyo, both Cuban and Brazilian national culture is found in spaces where creole masculinity is performed.

…es un discurso sobre la necesidad de hacer un performance de la supervivencia del más fuerte y del más apto. La masculinidad se funda, entonces, a partir de la articulación de la ansiedad de subvertir espacios sociales y negociar las divisiones raciales y de género, y de obtener la libertad.” (Arroyo 177)

Arroyo points out that the performative and violent concept of masculinity in the Americas is represented through the often criminalized and carnavalized creole performer.

Creating a linkage between the similar images of embodied culture in Cuban and Brazilian tradition has meant that the Cuban capoeira group, Caiman Capoeira, has made a conscious decision to define its practice as a cultural expression rather than as sport, even though capoeira in Cuba was first registered as an official sport and as a martial art under the Federación Cubana de Artes Marciales, which is a subdivision of Instituto Cubano de Deporte (INDER). After the revolution in 1959, the right of the population to practice sports took a central place in the imaginary of Cuba and INDER was created to regulate all sport activity within the country. In 2008, La Escuela Superior de Educación Física, “Comandante Manuel Fajardo,” which was created in 1961 as the school to train and graduate professionals in physical education, began to teach capoeira as part of its curriculum. It now organizes community projects in Havana and in the neighboring provinces of Pinar del Rio, Matanzas, and Ciego de Ávila.

However, even though there is a central governmental institution (INDER) given the duty of promoting capoeira in Cuba, focusing on capoeira as culture rather than sport allows Caiman Capoeira to access funds and visibility as a cultural group through the Cuban Ministry of Culture and through the Brazilian Consulate in Cuba (both of which provide more access to prominent cultural [and touristic] performance spaces than would be available solely through INDER). Capoeira as culture is parlayed into a resource for accessing and debating rights and capital among capoeiristas on an island where culture is a powerful economic resource.

Ultimately, the way and the extent to which a cultural identity is performed in the minds of a public and a governing body have dramatic effects on policy, capital flows, and the extent to which a people’s way of life is to be performed.  This point is articulated in George Yudice’s The Expediency of Culture when Yúdice argues that what is considered cultural, as well as the very concept of multiculturalism, has become a resource in the sense that they are endowed with near-quantifiable values, and that the value imposed on the cultural by an audience has a direct effect on how culture is performed (1). Yúdice’s linkage of cultural practice with political and economic access foretells Cuban capoeiristas interest in performing Brazilian capoeira as an expression of a cultural linkage between Cuba and Brazil. While capoeira’s arrival in Cuba may not be a diasporic experience, the imaging of this linkage of Brazilian capoeira to Cuban soil is elaborated through the diasporic experience of the Black Atlantic where performative acts of resistance are part of cultural survival tactics of those affected by the slave trade. They are, thus, expressions that can be both Cuban and Brazilian simultaneously and increase practitioners’ cultural clout within the Cuban performance space.

When enslaved Africans arrived in the New World, their direct connection to their countries of origin was cut off. When the transatlantic slave trade ended in 1850, memory and oral tradition became paramount in communicating these individuals’ sense of their past and their history. Furthermore, they adapted to their new social environment, adapting people from other ranks of society and incorporating other worldviews into those of their own.  The process of transculturation, the malleability of culture to fit the local context, is ever-present in the capoeira game.[3] Cuban capoeirista Daniel says, “We respect the Brazilian culture and we mix it with what we are able to get here in Cuba” (Daniel June 30, 2012). In practice, this means players construct berimbaus out of local bamboo wood, sew their own abadá (uniforms), or cut and dye their own chords at capoeira batizados[4] that they organize without the direction of a Brazilian mestre. Such an attitude embodies these fundamental ideas of transculturation employed in the New World.

Even though no Brazilian mestre has ever come to Cuba to teach classes formally for any extended length of time and although Cubans face limitations in access to the Internet, a tool usually utilized by capoeiristas abroad to exchange information about the sport, the capoeira community in Cuba is training regularly, expanding their presence on the island and developing a style of play that is unique to Cuba. We often think of Cuba mostly as an exporter of cultural traditions, since the Afro Cuban musical traditions based around the beat of the clave are at the basis of so many Latin musical rhythms. Also, because of the isolationist position of the Cuban society exacerbated by the US embargo, we often think of Cuban culture as developing independently from the same global influences on popular culture that are common throughout the world. But while the processes of this consumption may happen under different parameters, Cubans are constantly consuming popular culture from abroad and making it their own.  There is no such thing as a fixed or static national cultural identity, especially when this culture comes in contact with imaginings of an outside eye.  What does arise is a connectedness between cultures, identification with a set of imagined cultural norms, and a self-understanding that is negotiated within the overlapping of the convergences. In discussing these convergences, one member of Caiman capoeira said the following:

I see many comparisons between Brazilian culture and Cuban culture because of the African influences. It is a mixture that comes directly from Africa. It makes me think about how cultures so far away from one another could have so much in common. They are different, but the essence is the same. The ideas about trying to get energy out of the earth, for example, are the same. (Haisa July 1, 2012)

Uprooting and transplanting a cultural form is followed by compromise, sharing, and ultimately a transformation into a new cultural whole based on the conglomeration of various cultural traditions within a new territorial space. Fernando Ortiz explains this process through transculturation, a complex process of cultural transmission and diffusion. Fernando Ortiz’s classic work Cuban Counterpoint emphasized individual agency in selecting parts of dominant discourse and reworking this discourse into something new (1947: 102-103). Meanings are always adapted to fit the local context. While Fernando Ortiz’s work is cited as a fundamental text for understanding Cuban culture, it is important to note that his social and intellectual links with Europe and other parts of the Americas meant that his definitions of Cuban culture were in a transnational dialogue. There are many comparisons between the theoretical arguments of Ortiz who aimed to systematize the geographic origins of Africans in Cuba with the work of ethnographer Raymundo Nina Rodrigues in Brazil, for example. “Assim, o conhecimento etnográfico dos africanos vindos escravos para o Brasil, o qual não me consta tenha sido tentado antes de meus estudos, projeta larga e intensa luz sobre todos estes fatores, conferindo a cada qual uma fisionomia histórica justa e racional” (Rodrigues 70). The works of Raymundo Nina Rodrigues in Brazil and Fernando Ortiz in Cuba theorize “un sujeto masculino ‘de color,’ delincuente, excesivo y atávico” who is an important figure in defining nation in the respective countries (Arroyo 19). These founding ethnographers, who were so important in recording cultural performances seen as being “Brazilian” or “Cuban” respectively, communicated that the tastes, sounds, smells, and dances produced by the African Diaspora were paramount to creating and defining national identity. This was especially the case in terms of performances in which the black (and especially the mulatto) body used creativity to escape, at least during the space of the performance, his marginal position (Leo 29-47).

The modern discourse surrounding the globalization of capoeira emphasizes that changes in capoeira over time and place should not be viewed as a lack of authenticity but as an active, inevitable, and pervasive social tool by which culture becomes expedient, recreating the idea of bodily performance as a tactic to escape a marginal position. Following this logic, capoeiristas in Cuba, whose “communitas”[5] was once defined solely by their Cuban cultural expressions, have entered into a global context and are redefining definitions of culture and authenticity. This speaks to changes in gender and racial norms among practitioners globally, in which females and white practitioners can also embody the allegorical figure of cunning and resistance that had previously been associated with masculine creole identity. And it also explains how Cuban capoeiristas imagine their connection to capoeira and to Brazil not through a lived connection to a mestre, but through using creative malleability as a survival tactic, an expression consistent with their own social contexts.

As a physical manifestation of how Cuban and capoeira identity combine, Cuban capoeirista Daniel decided to get a capoeira tattoo on his forearm to mark the importance of capoeira in his life. But, he emphasized that the tattoo needed to highlight the Brazilian cultural tradition that he loved (capoeira) as well as the centrality his own Cuban identity and, inevitably, the Cubanness of the capoeira that he practiced. He designed a tattoo of a berimbau, the central musical instrument in capoeira, made not from the traditional beriba wood customary of berimbaus in Brazil, but from bamboo, the wood that Cuban capoeiristas have available to fashion their own berimbaus. The design of the tattoo has a Cuban flag wrapped around his berimbau, symbolically highlighting the importance of the local in the practice of Brazilian capoeira. (Daniel June 7, 2012)

Francisco, another Cuban capoeirista, explained that learning about the history of capoeira deepened his own connection to his Afro Cuban heritage. He described that he received the book Fundamentos da Malícia from a visiting student from Mexico and, after he understood the concept of malícia in capoeira, it motivated a deeper spiritual connection to similar concepts and practices in Cuba. As an example of how malícia becomes interpreted within the Cuban context, I remember the first time I met Francisco (who is now one of the instructors of capoeira at the Escuela Superior de Educación Físcia). We were playing capoeira in front of the arts and crafts market, Mercado de San José, in Habana Vieja. This market is very similar in concept to Mercado Modelo in Salvador, Bahia, and the capoeiristas in Havana often go there on the weekends to perform rodas, the circular space where the capoeira game is performed, for tourists and locals alike. Before we played, Francisco made a special signage with his fingers on the ground at the foot of the berimbau that he would later tell me was for his muerto (the spirit of a deceased, enslaved Cuban) that protects him during the roda. For Francisco, Cuban cultural traditions that were born of a similar Afro Atlantic experience are what drew him to develop such a strong passion for capoeira. His Cuban muertos, he said, protect him during the roda and guide his movements. He confessed he also secretly hides his resguardo, his protective charm from the Cuban Palo Monte religion, before entering any roda. (Francisco June 9, 2013)

What Francisco’s story represents is that Cuban capoeiristas can hold a cosmic view that approximates to both the historical setting of capoeira in Brazil and to their own lived Cuban experiences. While most practitioners would agree that capoeira as it is practiced today is a secular event and that any connection with spiritual practices, such as Candomblé or Catholicism, are indirect, rodas often begin with an invocation that explicitly gives praise to God (Deus) and many songs refer to saints and deities, both Christian and African (Lewis 14).  Brazil, and Salvador in particular, was (and is) home to many different religious traditions that intertwined in practice. Capoeira, according to Mathias Röhrig Assunção, was an important part of this uneasy coexistence during its formative years (116). Francisco’s understanding of the malícia in capoeira, the secularized understanding of how cunning has a greater spiritual significance, is often difficult to discern and describe to foreign capoeira players, the most common transnational manifestations of capoeira being in Europe and the United States. Globalization has made it common to see an American, French, German, or Italian make the sign of the cross before entering into the roda or even to touch the ground to make reference to the African ancestry of capoeira, even though it is likely that this is not part of the student’s own personal history. These foreign practitioners are following the codes of the ritual as they were taught, passed on via oral tradition from mestre to student, and then appropriated, creating a new spiritual significance to the capoeira ritual within the global context. For Cuban students, however, these codes and rules were not taught by a mestre but are often a manifestation of their own lived understanding of the relationship between the secular and the sacred understood through similar slippages in Afro Cuban manifestations of culture such as abakuá or rumba, for example. In fact, these elements of deep play in the Cuban capoeira game are becoming less visible in capoeira even in Brazil due to inevitable globalization and commodification as capoeira and culture itself becomes farther removed from this defining historical past. However, the ritualized understanding of malícia continues to be the key element of any capoeira game. In Cuba the ginga flows from Cuban experiences of performances of cunning and social inversions.

Embodying Malícia with Cubaneo

An Italian capoeirista who was living in Havana for six months in 2012 had the following to say about Capoeira in Cuba:

For what I have seen of capoeira in Cuba, people have a lot of feeling. I have seen capoeira in Brazil, in France, in Italy, and in Sweden. Sometimes people have a lot of financial possibilities to buy a berimbau, but they don’t even play it well. They don’t have the “sandunga” (swing), as they say in Cuba. And here the fact that Cubans have music in their blood means that it comes easier to them. They sing and they sing in rhythm. They play and they play with rhythm. If the music isn’t good the energy isn’t born. But here with very little they make marvelous things happen. We need to help them a little, right?  Send them things. Because they have the talent, the swing, and the malícia… (Vilma June 23, 2012)

According to Floyd Merrel, “Malícia is a little bit of ‘malice’, but with a sly, clever, ingratiating roguish gesture. It involves awareness of what’s going on under the surface appearance. Malícia is cunningly putting something on someone before she does it to you…The slaves developed malícia into a carefully honed instrument by means of which to generate subversive acts against their masters. Malícia became their way of coping with life, a way of life, the heart and soul of which is found in capoeira.” (Merrel 2005: 280)

Just like the upside-down aú and bananeira movements, capoeira is a microcosm where elements of power, prestige, politics, and existence are turned on their heads. Only the most cunning will survive. Literally and figuratively, the capoeirista has made these capoeira movements his weapon. The capoeirista is playful, but also very careful. Your opponent may smile in your face as he pulls your feet out from underneath you. In doing so, the capoeirista embodies this subversive behavior learned as street smarts for those born into colonial systems of servitude. Roberto Da Matta comments that “malícia” and “jeitinho” (finding a way to make something happen when there are no resources available) are characteristics of the Brazilian national psyche (204).

These traits of the national psyche are also true in Cuba and are, thus, naturally incorporated into the Cuban capoeira game. Although making resources out of nothing is not in and of itself revolutionary and, in fact, is characterized by making changes to better individual social situations without changing the status quo, it is representative of the politics of the everyday. It turns the average individual into a heroic figure resisting dominant oppression with creativity and skill. Representing the common man as an heroic figure is at the basis of Che Guevara’s conception of the “new man” put forth in “Socialism and Man in Cuba” (1965) through which Guevara called for the average man to use his creativity and spontaneity to battle the repressive systems of capitalist embargoes. Today, post-Special period, the “new” new man in Cuba questions this very institutional discourse; the common man looks at the unfulfilled promises of what was supposed to be a bright future, and uses the same social cunning to question the official Cuban discourse, citing the frustration of accessing the limited resources available to them in an outdated Socialist system.

Capoeiristas in Cuba talk about connecting to capoeira because it is an escape from “la lucha diaria,” literally the daily struggle for survival. Capoeira songs and movements are filled with irony and double meanings, incorporating the concept of malícia that is often so hard for foreign students to grasp because it cannot be taught, but must arise from its own social context of marginalization. For Cuban capoeiristas, a similar cultural language of metaphors and riddles are employed daily to deal with the difficulties of living through moments of scarcity caused by the political climate and/or the effects of the US embargo, using humor, metaphor, and performance to assert presence and identity.  Thus, the same concepts of malícia are at the heart of the Cuban psyche, only under a different name. For Cuban capoeiristas who have not had direct contact with Brazilian mestres or Brazilian cultural contexts, the idea of malícia, with its connections to spiritual powers as well as its ability to make something out of nothing, is interpreted through a Cuban understanding of cunning and street smarts known as cubaneo. In the Cuban context, inventing ways of survival or getting around the system when there does not seem to be any visible solution has become an important cultural marker of Cuban identity.

According to Pérez-Firmat,

Rather than naming un estado civil, [la cubanía] cubaneo names un estado de ánimo, a mood, a temperament, what used to be called a ‘national character’…Its frame of reference is not un país—a political entity—but un pueblo—a social and cultural entity… Cubaneo, finds expression in all of those habits of thought and speech and behavior that we know as typically criollos—the informality, the humor, the exuberance, the docility…” (Firmat-Pérez 4)

Cubaneo is a term to refer to a loose repertoire of gestures, customs, and vocabulary that mark Cuban national character. Works such as Jorge Mañach’s Indagación del Choteo (1928), Calixto Massó’s El carácter cubano (1941), and José Muzaurieta’s Manual del Perfecto Sinvergüenza (1922) are the best-known studies exploring the ways that Cubans invent a vocabulary of informality and humor towards living and survival. Unlike cubanidad or cubanía, which are born out of legal documents and governmental decrees of nationality, cubaneo denotes membership in a cultural community (Ibid). This cultural community and way of using methods of informality, gestures, and street smarts as survival tactics denote a similar understanding to the Brazilian malícia. Playing capoeira in Cuba then becomes an act of ritualizing cubaneo.

Capoeira and Baile de Maní

As such, capoeira is not a foreign practice to Cubans who have grown up with similar corporal gestations in which movement, music, and sacred energies are in dialogue. In explaining how learning about the history of capoeira has revealed similarities between Cuba and Brazil Minhoca said, “Santería and Candomblé. Here [in capoeira class] we learn about both of the religions and the drum rhythms for both” (Minhoca June 30, 2013).

In Los Bailes y el Teatro de los Negros en el Folklore de Cuba Fernando Ortiz writes,

…la danza [afrocubana] es originariamente un fenómeno dialogal, de magia o religión; por los efectos psíquicos de la danza y por la relación de su dinámica con los conceptos de la trascendencia de la acción sacromágica” (Ortiz 1951: 75).

Similarities in the institutional structures of colonialism in the Americas shaped the cultural sphere. Cuba became the largest producer of sugar after the Haitian Revolution of 1804. And in Brazil, sugarcane production was the largest earning crop in the slave plantations of Northeastern Brazil, especially in the states of Bahia and Pernambuco. Plantation systems as well as urban spaces in slave-holding societies in which slaves and poor, marginalized freedmen would congregate for social and financial reasons became places of creativity and performed resistance. Benítez-Rojo describes how the Caribbean (and I would argue that Northeastern Brazil can be included in this description) share a cultural history related to the structures of the sugar cane plantations. “The powerful machine of the sugar plantations attempted systematically to shape, to suit to its own convenience, the political, economic, social and cultural spheres of the country that nourishes it until that country is changed into a sugar island” (72). The Casa Grande became the basic structuring model for society and was a space for the generation of new cultural practices (Mwewa 153). The plantation system and slavery created the need for cultural acts of resistance in order to keep African (and indigenous) cultural traditions alive. These cultural performances that had their roots in systems of oppression created on plantations made their way to the cities through rural to urban migration.

Whereas in Brazil, capoeira was one of the products of the plantation system, making its way to urban centers when free Africans and Creoles moved into marginalized communities known as zungus, Cuban solares were parallel collective urban housing spaces for the poorest of the poor that also harbored cultural forms of resistance. Rumba, for example, is said to have “flourished in urban and rural settings where Cuban workers of all colors and occupations [gathered to share] their Creole heritage in music and dance…where free blacks gathered to communicate their feelings or comment on their struggles and enslaved Africans were permitted to congregate after work”  (Daniel 17). Musical synchronization between the drumbeat and the dancer is seen in the “rumba brava” or the “rumba de solar” just as it is in capoeira, for example.

Not only have Cuban capoeiristas brought up the connections between the cultural settings of rumba and capoeira and the importance of these practices in the performance of national identity, but playing capoeira has caused a new interest in a Cuban martial art that seems to have faded out of modern-day practice in Cuba: baile de maní. Maní, also known as Bambosá, was an African-derived acrobatic combat game that is rumored to have been widespread in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Cuba, especially in the central areas of the island such as in Matanzas, Villa Clara, Cienfuegos, Sancti Spíritus, and on the outskirts of Havana. These were all areas known for their sugar cane plantations. Fernando Ortiz documented one of the few detailed descriptions of maní in the 1930s in the neighborhood of “Los positos” in Marianao. This, interestingly, is also one of the last written documentations of baile de maní. Ortiz defined it as “consisting fundamentally in boxing, during which the player who is dancing tries to knock down one of the various participants, who remain on the defensive, and form a circle around him” (Ortiz 1951: 161).

El juego de maní consiste fundamentalmente en un pugilato, durante el cual un jugador que está bailando trata de abatir con un fuerte golpe a puño cerrado a uno de los varios participantes que están a la defensiva, formando un corro a su alrededor…Los maniseros iban descalzos, desnudos de la cintura para arriba y con calzones cortos o subidos a la rodilla; sin armas, insignias ni otro adorno que algún pañuelo de colores colgando de un ancho cinturón de cuero que les protegía el vientre. (IBID)

Mathias Assunção highlights its comparisons to the game of capoeira.

Despite its likely West African origins, maní offers a number of important parallels with capoeira, both in its formal aspects (played in a circle, with similar instruments, strikes embedded in a basic rhythmic movement) and its cultural meaning (multiple social functions, corresponding to the various modalities of the game, the role of ‘witchcraft’, and the importance of deception” (Assunção 63).

The origins of maní, like capoeira, are steeped in myth. It is possible that the name comes from Mani-kongo (King of the Congo Empire), which, according to Fernando Ortiz (1951: 160-161), is what the powerful freed blacks from the Congo region would call themselves.[6] Ortiz proposes that both rumba and maní are attributed to the Ganga, located in what are today the Sierra Leone and Liberia regions of West Africa. There are similarities between the two terms baile de maní and gangá maní, which is a term used to describe the dances of the manis, a group of people who migrated to Sierra Leone in the mid-sixteenth century (Ortiz 1951:164). Argeliers León supports this idea that baile de maní may be of bantú origin from the Congo region in his ethnographic study of Cuban folkloric traditions in “Del Canto y el Tiempo” (León 67-68).

Just as in capoeira, maní responded through lyrics to the game being played. The instrumentation of maní was usually two or three drums and an agogô.  Mathias Assunção makes the interesting observation that, although the berimbau is considered to be the iconographic instrument of capoeira, the first documentation of capoeira does not include the berimbau (7-8). The instrumentation of maní is actually very similar to capoeira as documented in the well-known engraving “Jogar Capöera-danse de la guerre” (1835) by Johann Moritz Rugendas, which is one of the earliest recorded visual representations of capoeira.[7]

There was also much exchange between players and musicians in both folkloric practices. For example, the leader of the musical line in maní was the cajero drummer. The cajero was supposed to mark a hard hit during the game with a hard hit of the drum. If the cajero missed the hit or was behind, he was taken off the instrument and put into the ring to be taken down. Similarly, different rhythms on the berimbau in capoeira mark a different style of game to be played. Whereas in capoeira, the circle of players surround a game of two capoeristas who battle in the middle, in the maní game, all men forming the circle could throw a hit. In both cases, however, the act of playing became an allegory of the physical violence one must avoid outside of the ring and a ritual for survival of the fittest.

Like capoeira, el baile de maní did not have a set choreography. Players would perform acrobatic punches and kicks to the rhythm of the music within a circle of other maniseros. In both practices players were noted for the surprise attacks that they performed on their opponents and the games were based in techniques of defense rather than attack. Yet, there are violent accounts of both maní and capoeira to the death.[8]

The spiritual worlds of maniseros and capoeiristas also hold parallels. The maniseros often used wrist bands or hid makutos in their belts, powerful charms prepared to help protect them and aid in their opponent’s defeat. In a parallel context, patuás, believed to ‘close the body’ and protect the owner from bad spells, were very popular historically among capoeiristas in Brazil (Assunção 118). Finally, although both were solitary fights, players often formed collectives. In Cuba, for example, one sugar cane plantation could challenge another plantation in maní games (Ortiz 1951:165). Capoeira is famously associated with maltas, Afro Brazilian gangs that would protect one another and battle rival gangs as well as the local authority.

The embodied performance of these cultural affinities parlays into powerful redefinitions of both Cuban and Brazilian culture. Maní was a Cuban folkloric practice that had all but disappeared since Ortiz’s last known documentation of it published in 1951. Today, however, capoeiristas in Havana are rediscovering it in their personal narratives explaining the Cuban connection to Brazilian capoeira. Since Cuban capoeiristas do not have mestres that are shaping their styles of play, they look towards and incorporate Cuban folkloric practices into the swing of their play. It is not uncommon to see movements from rumba or abakuá, for example, in a capoeira roda in Cuba. Players have also mentioned that they are incorporating the steps of baile de maní as part of their cubanization of capoeira. But, maní is not a contemporary practice in Cuba. This means capoeristas are reinterpreting what they imagine baile de maní must once have been like and applying that idea to their capoeira games. The interpretive powers of a Cuba-Brazil hybrid capoeira experience are actually resulting in a revival, or, at least, a rethinking of a Cuban cultural tradition that had been almost all but forgotten.

The capoeirista and the Íreme

Capoeira culture is also being incorporated into performances of Cuban cultural traditions. The way in which I first became involved with the capoeira community in Cuba is a particularly interesting example to illustrate this point. On November 27, 2011, I went to a march in honor of five Abakuá members who were killed in 1871 trying to defend eight medical students executed by the Spanish firing squad for allegedly desecrating a Spaniard’s grave; this was in the time of Spanish colonial rule when tensions between Spanish-born peninsulares and Cuban-born criollos were high. The yearly procession in honor of the 19^th-century medical students departs from the University of Havana and goes across town to La Punta del Prado where there is a statue in honor of these martyred medical students.  However, what is rarely mentioned in the commemorating event is that, along with these eight medical students, five black men also died that day trying to defend the students’ rights. These men were Abakuá members, a male initiatory secret society, who take oaths of lifelong loyalty to one another.

Abakuá Society[9] was founded in 1836 in La Regla and members, descendants of the Calabari cabildo, historically took a rebellious stance against Spanish colonial rule and slavery. As a mutual-aid secret society, Abakuá culture and lore has been transmitted orally and, though Abakuá lore has become ever-present in Cuban popular culture to represent the rebellious and anti-colonial aspects of Cuban culture, much of its meaning remains uninterpreted by outsiders. (Miller 161)

On the day of remembrance of the execution of the 19^th-century medical students in 2011, I did not actually go to the main procession leaving from the University of Havana, but to an alternative event, organized by the Abakuá Association of Cuba, that met in front of Editora Abril in Havana Vieja. I had heard of this event through the rumba circles where I had been studying dance, many of whose drummers and dancers were, themselves, Abakuá members. One of my dance partners was scheduled to play the part of one of the íremes for the march. The íreme, often referred to as the diablito ñañigo, is one of the principal figures in the Abakuá ceremony, representing an ancestral spirit from the other world that dances in typical Abakuá fashion for the duration of the ceremony.

When intellectuals and Abakuá members Orlando Gutierrez and Ramón Torres Zayas began their speeches, instead of beginning the event accompanied by the coro de clave of the abakuá or the beat of the Ékue drum (the ritual drum through which Tánse, the divine fish whose capture supposedly led to the creation of the abakuá society in Africa, and through which the voice of God is said to reverberate), the ceremony opened with the berimbau of capoeira. That was the first day that I met Cuban capoeira instructors Libre and Cobrinha, instructors for the group Caiman Capoeira. Libre played berimbau and sang capoeira songs to lead the event as Cobrinha answered the refrains and called for the crowd to join in.

The Brazilian berimbau opened a public event honoring the Cuban tradition of abakuá and its heroes, which is very significant given the strong markers of specifically Cuban creole culture that commemorate this particular day. Abakuá rhythms are in the basis of most Cuban music, including the rumba guaguancó rhythm, which is the symbol of Cuban national pride. So why was it that if there were Cuban drummers present, the organizers chose the berimbau to introduce the event as well as to be the musical accompaniment during the poetry reading? Purposefully or not, the berimbau, as a symbol of capoeira and, thus, an Afro Brazilian performance of cultural resistance against a dominant colonial system, brought a sense of universality to the specifically Cuban abakuá ceremony that day. The abakuá martyrs became martyrs of a whole cultural process that went far beyond the confines of Havana and linked the creole experience in Cuba to the rest of the Diaspora, sharing an historical experience in slavery and creative resistance across the black Atlantic.

After the berimbau, speeches, and poetry readings, the procession began down Prado Avenue led by two iremes. When the íremes finally arrived at the statue in honor of the medical students, the crowd watched as these íremes danced across the monument and the capoeiristas in the group began to organize a small roda off to the side. I watched in awe as I saw the movements of the íremes and the movements of the capoeristas blend into one.

Cuban capoeiristas overcome obstacles and pool their resources to reproduce capoeira a lo cubano. Players are transforming culture into a form of social capital within their own cultural context. Capoeira in Cuba embodies an experience of social inversion and performative resistance that was developed over centuries of Afro Atlantic exchanges. Though it is a Brazilian expression of national identity, capoeira blurs lines of nationality when localized into the Cuban context, creating a performative dialogue between observable Cuba-Brazil cultural affinities—of both past and present.

All photos are copyrighted to Annie Gibson, the author of this article.

The post Rediscovering lo cubano Through Capoeira in Cuba appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

… I think that anyone seriously engaged in cultural studies, as intellectual practice, must feel, in the skin, its transience, its unsteadiness, how little they register, the bit we accomplish to change or to encourage throughout (to) action. If you do not feel it as a tension in the work they produce is because the theory has left him in peace. Stuart Hall (2003a, p. 213).

I encountered the writings of Stuart Hall in the mid-1990s. At the time, I was pursuing my master’s degree in Education in the Graduate Program of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, under the advisement of Professor Maria Lucia Castagna Wortmann. At that time, I experienced the period of the creation of the above referenced program, as well as the research area “Cultural Studies in Education”. I remember that the circulation of Stuart Hall texts between teachers and students triggered an enthusiastic movement of research articulation in education with cultural analyses stemming from the Birmingham group, an anthropophagic movement of absorbing concepts, modes of writing and researching. We came to see our own questions and contexts with other eyes.

Studying the writings of Stuart Hall in the 1990s, in a Department of Education, opened up an enormous potential range of investigation that put into action educational research in a broader more visible manner with regards to cultural issues of ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, identity and consumption. With this, the focus on categories (strongly inspired by Marxist theories) such as those related to social class, labor, production and social reproduction, had their centrality challenged.

It is impossible to forget the poor translations (made ​​only for internal circulation among students and teachers) of Hall’s texts and the texts of other authors and researchers at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). I have been involved with the translation effort, together with other colleagues, for a book by Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay and Keith Negus titled, “Doing Cultural Studies: the Story of Sony Walkman”. We studied these materials and many others through a seminar taught by Professor Tomaz Thaddeus. The year was 1996. At the time, my English was not strong enough for such a difficult task. This weakness, however, allowed me to anticipate the scale of the effort devoted to studies of the texts that motivated us, driving new questions and new paths of research. That book marked a turning point in my training as a researcher able to articulate, in an engaging language, discussions about culture, media and identity. The notion that we negotiate our identities daily, in asymmetric networks of knowledge-power, (re) inventing them incessantly, without this process ending or being defined, impacted me deeply at the time. I had previously imagined carrying around an essence, an identity that was entirely mine, forever housed in my “soul”.

Stuart Hall (2000) taught me that the identities have to do “with the question of using the resources from history and language, as well as from culture, to produce not what we are, but what we become” (p.109). Thus, the construction of identities may be linked to a process of “invention of tradition” and, therefore, whatever we become has little connection with a pretentious possibility  ‘back to the roots.’ Such a process would be thus linked to “a negotiation with our routes“, in other words, with everything that went into constructing ourselves at different times in our history.

In the words of Hall (2000), identity is a concept “under erasure”, that is, inappropriate, unstable and non-necessary. Thus, according to this thought-provoking author, the concept of identity needs to be questioned as a problem on its essentialist and deterministic productions, and also with regard to its own development, in order to widely mark its provisional character as well as its political character. Hall (2003a) argues that it was racial issues, along with feminism, that checked the work of British cultural studies, while (until the 1980s) they were mostly “struggling” with Marxist theories. At a time in which issues related to race, sexuality, and gender in culture came to the foreground, cultural studies took a “linguistic turn”, that is, such studies, under the influence of Hall’s work, began to highlight the “crucial importance of language and linguistic metaphor for any study of culture” (HALL, 2003a, p. 211). According to the intellectual, “racial issues were important extrinsic sources in the formation of cultural studies” (p. 210), this “necessary deviation” from the field to the discovery of textuality, being then configured as key axes of cultural practices for those who have been interested in cultural studies while committed to a political agenda in tune with minorities (in terms of symbolic power).

I would also like to briefly focus on the question of the subject in the theories of Stuart Hall, approximating him to Michel Foucault, because for both of them the subject is taken in articulation with the discursive and non-discursive formations. Although Hall (2000), follows the theories of Michel Foucault with respect to the notion of the subject, he problematizes the thinking of the philosopher – both in its archaeological stage (centered on studies of discursive practices) as well as genealogical dimension (centered on the study of the relationship of knowledge-power) – with respect to limited discussion about the ways by which to interrupt, impede or disturb “the quiet insertion of individuals in positions of-subject constructed” by discourses (p.122). For Hall, it will be in his last phase (ethics) that the philosopher, concerned about the “technologies of the I”, emphasizes the practices “that might prevent this subject becomes, forever, just a docile, sexualized body” (p.125). Hall points out that the decentering of the subject does not mean its destruction, and, according to that, proposes that we think about it as articulated to discursive practices. The author seeks then, to highlight an active role of the subject in negotiation, transformation and reconstruction of meaning, assuming, according to Foucault, the notion of a historical subject (not a person who would be the source of all knowledge, or even transcendental) that is linked in a contingent way to the discursive practices of his time.

It is interesting to note, also, that Hall’s texts were important not only for my research papers, but also for the initiation and continued education of teachers of science and biology. I activated, through Hall (1997), an understanding of cultural practices that infinitely increased all articulatory possibilities starting with the thematic ones, until then seen as “the property” of biology and its teaching. This meant assuming the understanding that different cultural institutions or contexts (cinema, school, television, newspaper, advertising, literature), producers of artifacts (films, textbooks, television programs, newspaper articles, brochures) that we consume daily are also implicated, far beyond the science that takes place in laboratories, in the ways in which we learn to see, to read and to narrate the living world. In fact, Hall’s very own biology began to be seen by me as a cultural practice.

Finally, I would now like to point out some brief notes I made in pencil (at different moments during my professional career) in two texts by Stuart Hall (2003a and 2003b) that I greatly enjoy, “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms” and “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies.” Both were published in the book “From Diaspora: Identities and Cultural Mediations,” organized and compiled by Liv Sovik. The first edition appeared in Brazil in 2003, quite a distance from when I initially encountered the works.

In the first, I noted in the text’s margins, “it is interesting to see how Hall’s focus is on the relations”; “he runs away from an approach of causes and effects”; “the culture becomes ordinary”; “there is a deliberate escape from Marxism.” In the second, I sketched: “there is a rejection of meta-narratives”; “the project of cultural studies is open to the unknown, and there is a desire to connect and an involvement with the choices one makes”; “it’s amazing the idea that the theory that is worth retaining is the one that we have to contest and not that one that we speak with fluency”; “what would we like to stop within ourselves?”; “structuralism spoke about the institutional role of language, but with post-structuralism the issue of power and its effects were emphasized ;” “there is a recognition in Hall of the production of social movements”; “Something always escapes” …

What seems not to escape is the actuality, the political relevance, the effects upon us and in our practices that make so captivating the texts of one of the most exciting and challenging authors of the second half of the twentieth century: Stuart Hall.

Florianopolis/Brazil, April 1^st, 2014.

The post A Brazilian Take on the Writings of Stuart Hall appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

… penso que qualquer pessoa que se envolva seriamente nos estudos culturais como prática intelectual deve sentir, na pele, sua transitoriedade, sua insubstancialidade, o pouco que consegue registrar, o pouco que alcançamos mudar ou incentivar à ação. Se você não sente isso como uma tensão no trabalho que produz é porque a teoria o deixou em paz. Stuart Hall (2003a, p. 213).

Conheci os escritos de Stuart Hall em meados dos anos 1990. À época, eu estava cursando o mestrado no Programa de Pós-Graduação em Educação da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brasil, sob orientação da professora Maria Lúcia Castagna Wortmann. Vivi o período de criação, no referido Programa, da Linha de Pesquisa “Estudos Culturais em Educação”. Lembro que a circulação entre professores e alunos dos textos de Stuart Hall desencadeou um entusiasmado movimento de articulação das pesquisas em educação com as análises culturais provenientes do grupo de Birmingham. Um movimento antropofágico de deglutição de conceitos, modos de escrever e pesquisar. Passamos a ver nossas próprias questões investigativas, nossos contextos, com outros olhos.

Os estudos dos textos de Stuart Hall nos anos 1990, em uma Faculdade de Educação, abriu um enorme leque potencial de investigações que colocaram em cena nas pesquisas educacionais, de forma mais evidente e ampliada, questões culturais de etnia, de raça, de gênero, de sexualidade, de identidade, de consumo. Com isso, o enfoque em categorias (sob forte inspiração nas teorizações marxistas) como as de classe social, de trabalho, de produção e de reprodução social, tiveram sua centralidade contestada.

Impossível deixar de lembrar das traduções precárias (feitas apenas para circulação interna entre os alunos e os professores) dos textos de Hall e de outros autores e pesquisadores do Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). Estive envolvido com o esforço da tradução, conjuntamente com outros colegas, de um livro de Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay e Keith Negus chamado: “Doing cultural studies: the story of Sony walkman”. Estudamos este material e muitos outros através de um Seminário ministrado pelo professor Tomaz Tadeu. O ano era 1996. À época meu inglês era muito insuficiente para tão árdua tarefa. Isso permite antever a dimensão do esforço dedicado aos estudos dos textos que nos empolgavam, nos mobilizavam, nos remetiam a novas perguntas, a novos traçados de pesquisa. Tal livro marcou minha formação de pesquisador ao articular, em uma linguagem envolvente, discussões sobre cultura, mídia e identidade. A noção de que negociamos cotidianamente, em redes assimétricas de saber-poder, nossas identidades, (re)inventando-as incessantemente, sem que esse processo cesse ou se defina, impactou-me muito à época. Antes eu imaginava carregar uma essência, uma identidade que era só minha, desde sempre grudada em minha “alma”.

Stuart Hall (2000) ensinou-me que as identidades têm a ver “com a questão da utilização dos recursos da história, da linguagem e da cultura para a produção não daquilo que nós somos, mas daquilo que nos tornamos” (p.109). Assim, a construção de identidades estaria vinculada a um processo de “invenção da tradição” e, dessa forma, aquilo que nos tornamos tem ligação pouco estreita com uma pretensiosa possibilidade de volta às raízes. Tal processo estaria, assim, vinculado a “uma negociação com nossas rotas”, ou seja, com tudo aquilo que nos foi formando em diferentes momentos de nossa história.

Nas palavras de Hall (2000), a identidade é um conceito “sob rasura”, ou seja, impróprio, instável e não-necessário. Dessa forma, segundo esse instigante autor, o conceito de identidade necessita ser problematizado em suas produções deterministas e essencialistas, bem como em relação a sua própria necessidade de elaboração, de modo que seja amplamente marcado o seu caráter provisório e, também, político. Hall (2003a) argumenta terem sido questões raciais, juntamente com o feminismo, que colocaram em xeque o trabalho dos estudos culturais britânicos, quando ainda (até os anos da década de 1980) estavam predominantemente “em luta” com as teorizações marxistas. Ao mesmo tempo em que passavam a tematizar questões relativas à raça, à sexualidade e ao gênero, os estudos culturais passaram a assumir a “virada lingüística”, ou seja, tais estudos, sob a influência dos próprios trabalhos de Hall, passaram a destacar a “importância crucial da linguagem e da metáfora lingüística para qualquer estudo da cultura” (HALL, 2003a, p. 211). Segundo o estudioso, as “questões raciais foram fontes extrínsecas importantes na formação dos estudos culturais” (p. 210), nesse “desvio necessário” do campo à descoberta da discursividade e da textualidade, sendo, então, configuradas como eixos importantes das práticas culturais para os quais os estudos culturais têm estado interessados enquanto comprometidos com uma agenda política sintonizada com as minorias (em termos de poder simbólico).

Gostaria também de enfocar, brevemente,  a questão do sujeito nas teorizações de Stuart Hall, aproximando-o de Michel Foucault, pois em ambos o sujeito é tomado em articulação com as formações discursivas e não-discursivas. Hall (2000), embora siga as teorizações de Michel Foucault a respeito da noção de sujeito, problematiza o pensamento do filósofo – tanto em sua fase arqueológica (centrada nos estudos de práticas discursivas) como, também, genealógica (centrada no estudo das relações de saber-poder) – com relação a sua pouca argumentação a respeito dos modos de se interromper, impedir ou perturbar “a tranqüila inserção dos indivíduos nas posições-de-sujeito construídas” pelos discursos (p.122). Para Hall será em sua última fase (ética) que o filósofo, preocupado com as “tecnologias do eu”, destacará práticas “que podem impedir que esse sujeito se torne, para sempre, simplesmente um corpo sexualizado dócil” (p.125). Hall chama a atenção que o descentramento do sujeito não significaria sua destruição e, nessa direção, propõe pensá-lo como articulado às práticas discursivas. O autor busca destacar, então, um papel ativo do sujeito na negociação, transformação e reconstrução do significado, assumindo, seguindo Foucault, a noção de um sujeito histórico (não de um sujeito que seria fonte de todo conhecimento ou, ainda, transcendental) que está ligado de forma contingente às práticas discursivas de seu tempo.

É interessante registrar, ainda, que os textos de Hall foram importantes não apenas para meus trabalhos de pesquisa, mas com a formação inicial e continuada de professores de ciências e de biologia. Pude acionar, através de Hall (1997), um entendimento das práticas culturais que ampliava, quase infinitamente, as possibilidades articulatórias a partir das temáticas, até então, vistas como “próprias” à biologia e ao seu ensino. Isso significou assumir o entendimento de que as diferentes instâncias culturais (cinema, escola, televisão, jornal, publicidade, literatura) produtoras dos artefatos (filmes, livros didáticos, programas televisivos, reportagens jornalísticas, cartilhas) que consumimos diariamente também estão implicadas, para além da ciência que transcorre nos laboratórios, nos modos como aprendemos a ver, a ler, a narrar o mundo vivo. Aliás, a própria biologia passou a ser vista por mim como uma prática cultural.

Por fim, gostaria agora de apontar algumas breves anotações que fiz à lápis (talvez em diferentes momentos da minha trajetória profissional) em dois textos de Stuart Hall (2003a e 2003b) que gosto muito: “Estudos Culturais: dois paradigmas” e “Estudos Culturais e seu legado teórico”. Ambos publicados no livro “Da diáspora: identidades e mediações culturais” organizado e compilado por Liv Sovik. A primeira edição do mesmo no Brasil se deu em 2003, ano distante dos tempos em que já nos debruçávamos nos textos do autor.

No primeiro anotei (escrevi ao lado das páginas dos textos): “é interessante ver como o foco de Hall está nas relações”; “ele foge de uma abordagem de causas e efeitos”; “a cultura passa a ser ordinária”; “há um escape deliberado do marxismo”. No segundo rascunhei: “há uma recusa das metanarrativas”; “o projeto dos estudos culturais está aberto ao desconhecido e há uma vontade de conectar-se e há um envolvimento com as escolhas que se faz”; “é incrível essa ideia de que a teoria que vale a pena reter é aquela que temos que contestar e não a que falamos com fluência”; “o que gostaríamos de interromper em nós?”; “já no estruturalismo se falava do papel instituidor da linguagem, mas com o pós-estruturalismo ressalta-se a questão do poder e de seus efeitos”; “há um reconhecimento em Hall das produções dos movimentos sociais”; “algo sempre escapa”…

O que parece não escapar é a atualidade, a pertinência política, os efeitos em nós e nas práticas que nos enredam dos textos de um dos autores mais instigantes e desafiadores da segunda metade do século XX: Stuart Hall.

Florianópolis/Brasil, 01 de abril de 2014.

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The first piece I read by Stuart Hall was Cultural Identity and Diaspora, published in 1990.[1] His call to analyze the subject positions from which we speak resonated deeply with me, especially as I could easily draw parallels between that and feminist calls to situate oneself vis-à-vis our research and our praxis in order to challenge the assumption of neutrality. Hall writes, “We all write and speak from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific. What we say is always ‘in context,’ positioned,” (1990, 223). He then went on to talk about his own cultural and racial background[2], and how this impacted his work. While this may seem commonplace within postcolonial and feminist writing, I remember being quite taken aback by his decision to share such personal information in an academic space. Having had a background in sociology—which has been described by some as a collection of writings based on the work of men from five European countries —Hall’s insistence on openly situating oneself as both a product and agent of culture seemed to go against most of what I thought to be “good academic writing.” And yet, it made complete sense.

The second time I came across Stuart Hall was in a class I took for my MA in Gender Studies. This time the focus was on his work on representation: the ways in which power relations construct and reproduce the kinds of knowledges we have about specific places, peoples, and so on. Through the lens of representation, Hall addressed the extreme trauma of colonialism: “The ways in which black people, black experiences, were positioned and subjected in the dominant regimes of representation were the effects of a critical exercise of cultural power and normalization,” (1990, 225). He goes on to draw on Edward Said’s conceptualization of the colonized being constructed as different and Other, as well as Foucault’s reminder that every regime of representation is a regime of power/knowledge. What struck me at the time, and continues to register as extremely relevant to the field of postcolonialism, is Hall’s emphasis on how these representations of the colonized were internalized by the colonized: “They had the power to make us see and experience ourselves as ‘Other’,” (Ibid). This is similar to Fanon’s work on the psychological effects of colonialism, a subject that unfortunately remains somewhat understudied in the field of postcolonialism. As Hall writes, “It is one thing to position a subject or set of peoples as the Other of a dominant discourse. It is quite another thing to subject them to that ‘knowledge’,” (Ibid). It seems to be that we are still struggling with the effects of these legacies, as well as the reality that neocolonial processes continue to produce and reproduce these representations, and that these representations have very material effects. One only needs to be reminded of the ways in which Orientalist[3] representations of Afghan women served to partly justify the American invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

When I began researching Antonio Gramsci and his work on hegemony, I was especially excited to find that Stuart Hall had written an article on how Gramsci relates to studies of race and ethnicity.[4] Hall unsurprisingly finds some affinity with Gramsci, as Gramsci also drew largely on his experiences and his connections to society and the worker’s movement. In other words, he situated his theorizing within these lived experiences, as did Hall by constantly positioning and contextualizing himself in relation to his work. Hall rightly points out that Gramsci did not write on the colonial experience. Nevertheless, the concepts he developed can be applied to several pertinent questions in the field. One example is the way in which Gramsci theorizes the state as exercising moral and educative leadership. “It is not a thing to be seized, overthrown or ‘smashed’ with a single blow, but a complex formation in modern societies which must become the focus of a number of different strategies and struggles because it is an arena of different contestations,” (Hall 1996 435). Hall rightly goes on to apply this to the postcolonial context, where it is clear that revolutionary movements need to conceptualize the state in a more complex manner if they want to truly disrupt hegemony. This resonated with me particularly in relation to the 2011 Egyptian uprising, and the complex ways in which the Egyptian state is imbricated with specific social forces and economic interests, and the extremely complicated and layered nature of the state apparatus itself. Another example is Gramsci’s conceptualization of ‘common sense,’[5] which presents itself as truth but which is in fact a product of historical processes. Common sense is fluid and constantly shifting, and yet has immense ideological power. Again, it is clear that this can be linked to questions of race, representation, and the postcolonial conditions. Hall’s work on representation, for example, attempts to unpack some of these ‘truths’ and situate them as historically produced. Importantly, Hall concludes the piece by showing that despite Gramsci’s Eurocentrism, many of his formulations remain invaluable to the field of postcolonialism and race studies.

Years later, I find myself returning to Stuart Hall and still finding new concepts and ideas to consider. As my own research interests shift and grow, it seems as if the knowledge found in Hall’s work and life provide endless inspiration. Thinking about current events in Egypt and the role of nationalism made me once again revisit Hall and his work on cultural identity, and its explicit link to anti-colonial struggles, as “Our cultural identities reflect the common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provide us, as ‘one people,’ with stable, unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning, beneath the shifting divisions and vicissitudes of our actual history. Such a conception of cultural identity played a critical role in all the postcolonial struggles that have so profoundly shaped our world,” (Hall 1990, 223). He links this to Fanon’s work on culture and the anti-colonial struggle, and I find both of these extrapolations extremely pertinent today as we see nationalist rhetoric become increasingly visible in multiple postcolonial settings.

In writing this piece, I found myself repeatedly going back to my childhood experiences of watching specific television shows (Disney movies come to mind straight away), viewing film,, and reading specific kinds of literature, and am keenly aware of how my exposure to this Westernized body of media conditioned certain representations of who I was. Looking back, I can somewhat delineate what I thought the Netherlands was and what I thought Egypt was, and by extension, what I thought it was to be Dutch or Egyptian, despite growing up in Zambia and only visiting both countries once or twice a year. Yet these representations were so strong that I continue to struggle with them today as I attempt, consciously and unconsciously, to unlearn both the positive representations of the Netherlands and the negative representations of Egypt, both of which lacked nuance. This is precisely what Stuart Hall speaks of when he says that representations are powerful because they not only are imposed by a dominant force, but become internalized and almost constitutive of the ways in which being dominated conceptualize themselves and the world. Moreover, these representations do not just have effects on personal identification. They also have deep and lasting material consequences that are expressed economically, politically and socially.

I will conclude with a final quote from Stuart Hall on the Caribbean, to emphasize just how important his work is to postcolonial studies across regions as well as to the millions of people around the world who have been touched by colonial process:

“Where Africa was a case of the unspoken, Europe was a case of that which is endlessly speaking—and endlessly speaking us. The European presence interrupts the innocence of the whole discourse of ‘difference’ in the Caribbean by introducing the question of power. In terms of colonialism, underdevelopment, poverty and the racism of colour, the European presence is that which has positioned the black subject within its dominant regimes of representation: the colonial discourse, the literatures of adventure and exploration, the romance of the exotic, the ethnographic and traveling eye, the tropical languages of tourism, travel brochure and Hollywood, and the violent, pornographic languages of ganja and urban violence. How can we stage a dialogue with Europe so that we can place it, without terror or violence, rather than being forever placed by it?” (Italics mine. 1990, 233).

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