Capoeira Connections

“Wesolowski mobilizes decades of movement experience—through diverse styles of physical training as well as through diverse cultural contexts—to explore the convivência of capoeira: the ways in which it choreographs relationships across difference (of race, class, gender, nation, and more). Through her always engaging and often moving personal narrative, one slowly forms an understanding of the nuances and complexities of that dance.”—Barbara Browning, author of Samba: Resistance in Motion

“A page-turner and a great example of ethnographic writing that shows not only how an art form has changed over time but how people also change with art.”—Gladys Mitchell-Walthour, author of The Politics of Blackness: Racial Identity and Political Behavior in Contemporary Brazil

“In Wesolowski’s love letter to capoeira, we see, hear, and feel the convivência that emerges through extended intersubjective and embodied dialogue. Capoeira appears not only as a portal through which practitioners imagine and bring into being alternative worlds, but also as a complex and transnational infrastructure, one that travels through people and through which people travel. Ethnographic memoir at its best!”—Deborah A. Thomas, author of Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair

“Situating her work in a tradition of feminist anthropology and dance ethnographers, Wesolowski uses a personal-reflective approach as a potent site for meaning-making. . . . The book will be of value to many capoeiristas playing across the globe, as well as dance ethnographers, researchers of African and African diaspora dance and culture, scholars of Brazil, Latin Americanists focused on expressive cultures, anthropologists interested in practice-based methods or creative approaches, writing students, and all who are keen on rendering embodiment as a nexus of the [inter]personal, political, cultural, and historical.”—Dance Chronicle