Capoeira and protest music: solidarity-based mimesis in favor of education

Abstract

Among the possibilities of resistence and, more so, of survival developped by enslaved populations, we find the act of mimesis. Conceptualized as a form of disguise and as an appropriation of the discourse of the ‘other’, mimesis enabled maroons to maintain and extend their cultural legacy into the present. Transculturation and cultural anthropophagy make evident how mimesis adopts, transmutes and adapts what it sees as necesary from other cultures so that discourses may survive beyond their enunciators. Its expansive reach can be studied in relation to the musical genre that appears, at the end of the 1960s, with noteworthy strength in the face of the oppression imposed by the dictatorship of Da Costa e Silva in Brazil: protest songs. By means of mimesis, student songs that were intended to mobilize people against the dictator were resignified, decades later, in a capoeira song known today in many distant countries as a song of freedom and a latent memory of enslavement which has not fully ceased. This article searches for the potential bridges that facilitate the use of the same choir in the two songs mentioned and analyses the mimetic process that allows it to function for both themes, although they were structured according to different subjects, in different times and contexts.