UC Berkeley

What if the memory of slavery were not an archive to be recovered, but a force that makes and unmakes those who come into contact with it? In capoeira—the Afro-Brazilian art form that braids dance, combat, music, and ritual into a single tradition—practitioners all over the world sometimes feel ancestors arrive through the rhythm of a musical bow, watch their bodies become something other than human, and describe historical pain lodged in their hips and joints. Rather than treating these moments as “beliefs” about the past or as ways of coping with trauma, this dissertation argues that they point to a broader way of inhabiting the relationship between form, cosmology and historicity. I use the term quilombo mnemonics to refer to the processes through which historical recursivity works in the life of my interlocutors as ontological force rather than as representational content—generating new configurations of body, time, and personhood not by redeeming or transcending the historical negation that produced them, but by working through it and, paradoxically, within it.Drawing on two years of fieldwork with capoeiristas in southern Brazil and in the San Francisco Bay Area, I follow the invocation of the historical imaginary of slavery and captivity in the everyday life of practitioners, paying particular attention to how they engage with religious referents in the oral repertoire of capoeira and with the ubiquitous figure of the quilombo—the practice of maroon settlement enacted by enslaved fugitives and their descendants, now a living metaphor for Black autonomous life in many capoeira communities and in Brazilian racial politics more broadly. Against approaches that reduce the deployment of these historical motifs to identitarianism, multiculturalism, or historicism, I show that these such deployments generate unforeseen cosmopolitical dilemmas and disputes that prompt my interlocutors to engage in an active negotiation of the boundaries of selves, bodies, historical processes, identity categories, and religious traditions. The chapters develop this argument across different scales: quilombo as a portable technique of multiplicity whose refusal of closure is also what exposes it to capture from within; the body not as biological substrate but as an event of composition, whose plasticity hosts more-than-human agencies through the same modality that transformed enslaved bodies into flesh; abstraction as a productive force rather than a privation, where concealment and transmission become coextensive and form is composed from within the abyss of dehumanization rather than against it; the cosmo-ontological character of what practitioners call “history,” figured through Exu, the Yoruba orixá of the crossroads, where ancestral forces participate as constitutive elements of a tradition of dispute rather than consensus; and the commodity form, where the market presses the metamorphic body back toward a dualist personhood and “pain” circulates as a portable substance that nonetheless retains an inscrutable surplus. The analysis of the case studies presented in this dissertation attends to symptomatic recurrence and displacement where frameworks built around cultural survival or its constructivist reversal might instead anticipate continuity of reference. It places the Brazilian Black radical tradition into conversation with anglophone Black studies and with anthropologies of Afro-Brazilian religion that take ontological multiplicity seriously, without dissolving any one of these registers into the others. The dissertation accordingly proposes a non-secular account of social death adequate to the cosmological and theological dimensions of my interlocutors’ discourses, while declining the vitalist celebration of generativity that frequently accompanies ontologically inflected readings of Afro-diasporic practice. Across all five chapters, history appears neither as recoverable cultural depth nor as ideological-discursive construction; it surfaces as the structural negation from which cosmological composition through multiplicity becomes thinkable in the first place, working through that negation metamorphically and indeterminately toward unforeseen horizons.