Diaspora without displacement the coloniality and promise of Capoeira in Senegal

"Diaspora Without Displacement is an ethnography of racial self-making in urban West Africa, specifically Senegal, through the embrace of the Afro-Brazilian martial art Capoeira. The book traces how West Africans use capoeira as a way of articulating themselves as Black and kin to members of the global Black diaspora. Although Brazilian capoeira is rooted in Angola, Dakar and the surrounding areas became the home of its return to Africa in the 1990s. This recontextualization helps Senegalese practitioners engage with the history of the transatlantic slave trade from which capoeira developed and as well as what it means to be African in the ongoing history of postcolonial movements. In this way, West Africans use capoeira to participate in the African diaspora without leaving the continent. At the same time, Celina de Sá shows how this sense of Africanness can give way to connections and competitions that renew West African regionalisms, and creative practices can also reproduce racial hierarchies-which de Sá calls the coloniality of Black performance"--