Evading Biopolitical Control: Capoeira as Total Resistance

Abstract

The analysis of “total war” as systemic, ubiquitous and unrelenting has increased the analytical and political urgency of understanding resistance. Drawing on Foucault’s elaboration of biopolitics and “making strange”, this article theorises “total resistance” through a study of the Afro-Brazilian art of capoeira. It explores how capoeira adepts in the early 20th century resisted the “total war” of state repression of capoeira and the heritage that it embodied. This article argues that, by engaging with, and protecting themselves against, the state, capoeira practitioners demonstrated resilience through adaptation and diversification. The corporeality of capoeira provided a holistic response to the biopolitical power of the state, and capoeira players “made strange” (in Foucauldian terms) the normalcy of power, rescuing themselves and their way of life. In answer to the “total war” that makes patterns of violence apparently inevitable, the “total resistance” of capoeira evaded obliteration, and maintained the possibility of other outcomes.