ABSTRACT
The next two chapters address the question of what knowledge is produced through capoeira. This chapter investigates the what, when and who of capoeira: through references to work in the farms, markets and docks, the identity of the labouring class man of early twentieth-century Bahia is constructed through lyrical and corporeal representation. There is intersectionality between class and race, and the discourse of race was more explicitly developed since the 1980s, focusing on the African heritage of the game. A discourse of struggle and heroism was attached to tropes of slavery, and there was an increasingly prominent invocation of the name ‘Angola’ in songs. Themes of class and race are reiterative, alongside the geographical setting of north-eastern Brazilian coastline.
