Uprooting Origins: Racial Self-Making and Diasporic Cultural Production in West Africa

The Departments of Anthropology and Africana Studies Present:

Uprooting Origins: Racial Self-Making and Diasporic Cultural Production in West Africa

Celina de Sá, Postdoctoral Fellow,  Anthropology, University of PIttsburgh

This talk will address how contemporary expressive cultural projects in Lomé, Togo, and Dakar, Senegal highlight processes and practices of racial self-making germane to the lives of urban West Africans. By looking at West African capoeira groups—a martial art developed by enslaved Afro-Brazilians in colonial Brazil—we see how young people in the region creatively leverage the historical ties across the black Atlantic as resources for facing the particular challenges of postcolonial precarity, and other legacies of imperialism. Through material culture and performance, these martial artists demonstrate some of the ways in which young West Africans are putting capoeira to “work,” mobilizing the diaspora as a technology to create new narrative and agential possibilities to define their own Africanness.