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A emergência dos estilos modernos de capoeira deve ser considerada no contexto global da modernização de artes marciais em curso na Europa e na Ásia, por um lado, e, por outro, da nova fase da modernidade negra. O confronto, no ringue, da capoeira com o jiu-jítsu e outras lutas levou mestre Bimba a desenvolver sua luta regional baiana. A revitalização da capoeira tradicional como capoeira de Angola, liderada por mestre Pastinha, insere-se no movimento mais amplo de afirmação da cultura afro-baiana em Salvador e da crescente visibilidade do corpo negro no mundo atlântico.

O artigo é baseado em entrevistas feitas com pessoas na sua maioria idosas em vários municípios do nordeste do Maranhão, em 1982. Documenta a memória oral da escravidão de indivíduos e comunidades afrodescendentes e mestiças. Os depoimentos fornecem informações preciosas sobre o trabalho quotidiano, a violência sofrida pelos escravizados e as várias maneiras de resistir aos senhores e feitores. São analisadas algumas categorias-chaves desta memória oral, como a dicotomia entre o "bom" senhor e o "ruim" ou "malvado". O texto destaca algumas singularidades da escravidão dos africanos e de seus descendentes no Maranhão.

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Over the last years, British television has shown clips of capoeira almost daily. One of the "idents" used by the British Broadcasting Corporation to advertise multiethnic "Cool Britannia" features capoeira, and is usually broadcast at prime time just before the ten o'clock news. This is just one example of how globalized capoeira has become, and it also demonstrates how much young Brazilians from modest backgrounds and with no formal education can achieve through capoeira. Yet capoeira's very success also entails the danger that the art might become just another commodity marketed by global capitalism. Capoeira is not just a different type of aerobics or flashy acrobatics accompanied by exotic music. It is a multilayered art form of amazing cultural density, with its own worldview and a history closely linked to that of the African Diaspora. The lyrics are central to the capoeira game to stimulate players or to comment on their performance and are thus worth an analysis on their own. Slaves and freed people widely practiced combat games in late colonial and imperial Brazil. Different modalities, known under the generic name capoeira, developed according to both the vicissitudes of the transatlantic and internal slave trades and the local contexts in Para, Pernambuco, Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, and other regions. Capoeira usually involved some form of mock combat in a circle, the roda (ring), accompanied by instruments, hand clapping, and singing. Whilst friendly games were part of slave and popular diversions, rougher games could end in brawls, injuries, and even death. Throughout the Brazilian Empire (1822-1889), authorities considered that playing capoeira was "unacceptable behavior" requiring immediate correction in the form of whipping and forced labor in the Navy dockyards. The Republican Penal Code (1890) outlawed it together with vagrancy. Repression of the capoeiras,l although brutal, was often unsystematic and inefficient. 2 Where and how did capoeira originate? This is a question twentieth-century practitioners often raised and still discuss with passion since capoeira is paramount to the construction of several identities. Since primary sources referring

This article seeks to explain the breakdown of post-colonial order in the northern Brazilian province of Maranhão that culminated in the Balaiada rebellion (1838–41). Interpretations usually do not take into account the intense political agitation of the previous decades, which already involved lower class participation, and they fail to recognise the major socio-economic differences between the areas touched by the revolt. The main arguments are, first, that the struggle for Independence in Maranhão, more violent than in most other provinces, opened the door to lower class involvement in politics under liberal leadership. Secondly, the struggle between local elites for regional power led to exclusion of peripheral elites within the province and fuelled lower class unrest. Significant moments of rupture between liberal leadership and popular movement occurred as early as 1823–4 and 1831–2. Thirdly, the main structural factor leading to the 1838 outbreak of rebellion was the resistance to military recruitment by the free lower classes, which provided a unifying slogan to otherwise heterogeneous groups of peasants, cowboys, and fishermen. Fourthly, the differences in social structure between the cattle producing South, the cotton plantation belt of the Itapecuru valley and the strong subsistence sector in Eastern Maranhão account for substantial differences in terms of support and leadership during the Balaiada. Whilst fazendeiros lead the struggle in Southern Maranhão, as well as in most of the neighbouring Piauí province, leadership in Eastern Maranhão was almost entirely of lower class origin. Finally, the dynamics of the movement could lead in Eastern Maranhão to a rupture with elite liberalism and envisage the alliance between free rebels and maroons.

My father was a tenant farmer And a great sharecropper He sang calango all night through And never lost at rhyming Martinho da Vila 1Benedito Gonc¸alves, after a challenge game with one of those present, left with Salvador for the road, and on this occasion he, the witness, saw Benedito assault Salvador with a number of blows. 2 Guaratingueta´, 1890 APPROACHING MALE CHALLENGES In her seminal work on free men in a slave society, Maria Sylvia de Carvalho Franco emphasized the pervasiveness of violence among free poor men in the Paraı´ba valley during the nineteenth-century Brazilian Empire. Physical aggression happened frequently between men who were neighbours, coworkers, friends, or even related to each other, she wrote, and these 'violent altercations were not sporadic', but part of 'the flux of everyday life'. For Franco, that violence 'permeates the entire social organism, emerging in the less regulated sectors of life, such as leisure relations, and projects itself on to the codification of fundamental cultural values'. On the basis of nineteenthcentury criminal records in the municipality of Guaratingueta´, she notes that while fights originated in various contexts, they always derived from verbal challenges. It is these 'poetic disputes', and their relationship with physical challenges between males, that I examine in this article.Although Franco perceived the importance of the desafio (challenge) in the popular culture of the region, she greatly underestimated, in my view, its creative potential and the variety of its social functions. Perhaps her reliance upon criminal records, combined with a curious neglect of other types of source, conditioned her somewhat negative assessment of popular culture in