Sport and Capoeira. National Identity and Globalization

In their interesting study on Sport and Globalization, Toby Miller, Geoffrey Lawrence, Jim McKay and David Rowe (2001) observe a parallelism between the commercial boom of imperialist Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the process of creating an order global for mass sports such as football, tennis, cricket, or athletics. The question of the expansion of the capitalist logic on sport is posed, as we will see below, in terms of the passage from British to North American imperialism. But there is another Empire, outside the concerns of the authors, within whose vast domains, a type of corporal practice also emerged, a warrior dance, a martial art, transformed at a given moment into a sport. We are talking about the great Portuguese empire, where capoeira emerged, an art whose study will allow us, reinforcing and expanding the theoretical perspective of Toby Miller and his companions, to emphasize the incorporation of sport, through the sportivization of the game, in the capitalist societies of the 20th century, as an important element for the intellectual construction of that national-popular culture that guarantees the hegemony, in the national space, of a social class that has the capacity to present, internally and externally, its particular interests as the interest of the whole of the people-nation and, with that, negotiating, even, especially in the current moment of globalization, its insertion in the different structures of international power.