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Capoeira is an Afro-Brazilian martial art now spreading over the rest of the world and this book, the only complete history of the art in the English language, traces the history of the martial art and examines its influence.
Capoeira is an Afro-Brazilian martial art now spreading over the rest of the world and this book, the only complete history of the art in the English language, traces the history of the martial art and examines its influence.
Peasant Rebellion in a Slave Society identifies the immediate and remote reasons for the Balaiada revolt in Maranhão, Brazil, analyzing the special characteristics of the region that favored the development of a relatively independent peasantry within and around the cotton, rice, cassava, and cattle estates. The book explores the demography of Maranhão and patterns of land ownership and documents the rapid degradation of the environment by plantation‐based export agriculture. The analysis of various types of coerced and free labor, the oligopolistic structure of the colonial economy, and the key determinants of class and status contextualizes the conflict potential in Maranhão during th...
Capoeira evolved as a Brazilian martial art developed initially by that country’s African slaves. Marked by deft, deceptive movements played on the ground or completely inverted, the form started gaining worldwide popularity in the early 20th century, when this second volume of Gerard Taylor’s wide-ranging history begins. The book opens with a study of the capoeira “Bamba,” Mestre Bimba, who became renowned as a fighting champion in Bahia and opened the first legal academy during the dictatorship of Getulio Vargas. Taylor investigates the dramatic development of the schism that resulted in the competing styles of Regional and Angola. Moving into contemporary capoeira, the author prov...
A groundbreaking investigation into the migration of martial arts techniques across continents and centuries The presence of African influence and tradition in the Americas has long been recognized in art, music, language, agriculture, and religion. T. J. Desch-Obi explores another cultural continuity that is as old as eighteenth-century slave settlements in South America and as contemporary as hip-hop culture. In this thorough survey of the history of African martial arts techniques, Desch-Obi maps the translation of numerous physical combat techniques across three continents and several centuries to illustrate how these practices evolved over time and are still recognizable in American cul...
Any life story, whether a written autobiography or an oral testimony, is shaped not only by the reworkings of experience through memory and re-evaluation, but also art. Any communication has to use shared conventions not only of language itself but also the more complex expectations of 'genre': of the forms expected within a given context and type of communication. This collection of essays by internationl academics draws on a wide range of disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities to examine how far the expectations and forms of genre shape different kinds of autobiography and influence what messages they can convey. After investigating the problem of genre definition, and traci...
The political and religious forces which led to the decline of the slave trade in nineteenth century Bahia, Brazil.
On January 1, 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared the independence of Haiti, thus bringing to an end the only successful slave revolution in history and transforming the colony of Saint-Domingue into the second independent state in the Western Hemisphere. The historical significance of the Haitian Revolution has been addressed by numerous scholars, but the importance of the Revolution as a cultural and political phenomenon has only begun to be explored. Although the path-breaking work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Sibylle Fischer has illustrated the profound silences surrounding the Haitian Revolution in Western historiography and in Caribbean cultural production in the aftermath of the R...
This book examines how Latin American countries and Spain tried to build modern and efficient state institutions for more than a century - without much success. The chapters tell how these countries went about constructing systems of authority that could manage their territories, support economic development, provide basic services, and promote a sense of national community. The book can serve as an introduction to nineteenth-century Latin America and Spain, as a historical guide to the process of state building, and as a tool for experts looking for the latest work by leading scholars in the field.
In the past forty years an entirely new paradigm has developed regarding the contact population of the New World. Proponents of this new theory argue that the American Indian population in 1492 was ten, even twenty, times greater than previous estimates. In Numbers From Nowhere David Henige argues that the data on which these high counts are based are meager and often demonstrably wrong. Drawing on a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, Henige illustrates the use and abuse of numerical data throughout history. He shows that extrapolation of numbers is entirely subjective, however masked it may be by arithmetic, and he questions what constitutes valid evidence in historical and scientific scholarship.