| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Caribbean and Latin America

Matthias Röhrig Assunção. Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art. (Sport in the Global Society.) New York: Routledge. 2005. Pp. xiii, 267. $24.99.
This is by a wide margin the best book yet published on the history of capoeira, in any language. Matthias Röhrig Assunção has done the archival digging that most previous authors have been unable or unwilling to undertake, and has avoided the essentialism and willful invention of tradition that pervade the most popular accounts. Instead, he makes the competing and overlapping accounts of capoeira's origins part of his subject, emerging with a rich account not only of the game itself but of the ways in which it has been understood and its place in larger debates on the meanings of Afro-Brazilian culture. He also incorporates and builds on exciting recent Brazilian scholarship on capoeira and nineteenth-century social history more generally, and he connects these inquiries to capoeira's globalization over the past two decades. The result, as they say in capoeira, is a compelling and authoritative volta do mundo—a trip around the capoeira ring that is at the same time a trip around the world.	1
Most capoeira academies cultivate the myth that capoeira has always been first and foremost a manifestation of Afro-Brazilian resistance, and they support this with an assortment of complementary myths: that it was invented by runaway slaves, that it arrived full-grown with the slave trade from Angola, that its movements derive from the struggles of shackled slaves, that its musical components were developed to disguise the preparation for battle. The mutual contradictions of these myths does not prevent their simultaneous deployment by self-proclaimed authorities. Assunção takes them apart with care and admirable restraint: regarding the tendency of several authors to see apparitions of African survivals, he writes, "There are sufficient facts to corroborate the Angolan origins of capoeira—we do not need to invent any" (p. 27).	. . .

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