Founded in 2013, with generous gift from the Saab Family Fund, the Saab Center for Portuguese Studies promotes the multidisciplinary study of the language, literature and culture of the vast and varied Portuguese speaking world comprised of over 250 million people in eight countries on four continents and its diaspora.
Monday, September 23, 2024, at 5 p.m.
Coburn Hall 255 or via Zoom
Free and open to the public.
Presented by the Saab Center for Portuguese Studies.
Capoeira, created in Brazil by enslaved Africans several hundred years ago and once criminalized, is today a popular practice around the world. A dynamic blend of play, fight, dance, acrobatics, music and ritual, capoeira brings together diverse practitioners across nationality, race, age and gender. This talk explores the connections, and at times disconnections, that capoeira has fostered throughout its history. Drawing on her thirty years of experience as a capoeira practitioner, ethnographer and instructor, Prof. Wesolowski offers some lessons that this embodied dialogue can teach us about being – and moving – together across and with difference.
Katya Wesolowski
Katya Wesolowski is a lecturing fellow in Cultural Anthropology and Dance at Duke University. Her research and scholarship move through the African Diaspora, from Brazil to Angola, exploring the ways bodies in movement together can create spaces of radical openness and transformative belonging. Her first book, Capoeira Connections: A Memoir in Motion (UPF 2023), is a multi-sited ethnography that interweaves the local and global histories and flows of this Afro-Brazilian combat game with her own thirty-year trajectory as a practitioner, researcher and instructor. For more on her scholarship, teaching and media, and a link to the open access edition of her book, visit www.katyawesolowski.com. Mestre Calanga (Luis Carlos Galvez) has been practicing capoeira since 1980. Born in Brazil, he has lived in Lowell for more than 20 years, where he leads the group Capoeira Rosa Rubra. His philosophy is to teach capoeira as a cultural practice and a therapy tool to help his students understand both themselves and the world around them. Read her Faculty bio. on the Duke website.
Image by Pedro Letria
We hope you can join us on June 8 for the opening of this intimate view of Lowell’s Portuguese Community as captured by photographer Pedro Letria.
Learn more about The Portuguese In Lowell: The Familiar And The New
Image by Lowell Historical Society
The Back Central Project is a comprehensive study of an historic urban neighborhood in Lowell, rich in its immigrant, social and cultural history. UMass Lowell’s Saab Center for Portuguese Studies is leading this interdisciplinary effort along with the History Department and Art & Design.
