[Review of] Ray Allen and Lois Wilken, Island Sounds in the Global City: Caribbean Popular Music and Identity in New York

In putting together Island Sounds in the Global City: Caribbean Popular Music and Identity in New York, editors Ray Allen and Lois Wilcken were undaunted by the enormity of their tasks of contextualizing and capsulizing the breadth of Latin American and Caribbean popular music, and exploring the complex nexus between these musics and ethnic identity in New York City. By eliding these tasks the editors facilitated their work

Engolo and Capoeira. From Ethnic to Diasporic Combat Games in the Southern Atlantic

This article provides a re-examination of the main Afrocentric narrative of capoeira origins, the engolo or ‘Zebra Dance’, in light of historical primary sources and new ethnographic evidence gathered during fieldwork in south-west Angola. By examining engolo’s bodily techniques, its socio-historical context and cultural meanings, the piece emphasises its insertion into a pastoral lifestyle and highlights the relatively narrow ethnic character of the practice in Angola. This analysis and the comparison with capoeira helps us to develop certain hypotheses about the formation, migration, and re-invention of diasporic combat games between southern Angola and coastal Brazil, and more broadly, to increase our understanding of how African cultures spread across the southern Atlantic