Masteries of Mestre Pastinha: an intelectual of the gingada city

Author(s)

Jorge Mauricio Herrera Acuna

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2017-10-30

Examining board members

Lilia Katri Moritz Schwarcz; Arcadio Díaz quiñones; Pedro Meira Monteiro; Jocélio Teles dos Santos; Laura Moutinho da Silva

• Advisor: Lilia Katri Moritz Schwarcz

Abstract

Vicente Ferreira Pastinha, better known as Mestre Pastinha, is the main reference to the practice of capoeira angola (the Afro-Brazilian martial art) and also, one of its great thinkers. Born in the end of the XIX century in Salvador, Bahia, Pastinhas life evolved in parallel with crucial moments in the historiography of Afro-Brazilian subaltern classes along the XX century. From the 1940s onwards, Pastinha carries forward a proposal to preserve a traditional style of capoeira, a practice still negatively correlated with the social markers of race, colour and class. In doing that, Pastinha looks to create a biography that silences certain dimensions of his past while it privileges others. In the same process, he also affirms himself as an important intellectual of the gingada city (cidade gingada) a notion we define as opposed to the concept of the lettered city. The distances, approaches, crossings and tensions between those two dimensions are the main focus of this analysis, which underlines the role of the environment in Pastinhas experience during the pos abolition period and his pathway until 1971. Along this time, the Mestre emerges from a situation of invisibility among capoeira practitioners, to lead the initiative for the Centro Esportivo de Capoeira Angola (Capoeira Angolas Sport Center) at Pelourinho (Salvadors Historic Center). The wide recognition of Pastinhas experience at Ceca allows him to travel across many Brazilian cities to exhibit the practice of capoeira and to become one of the Brazilian representatives at the First World Festival of Black Arts in Senegal in 1966. Thus, our main goal is to analyse, through Vicente Ferreira Pastinhas trajectory, the conditions of emergence, experimentation, consolidation and recognition of subaltern and racialized knowledges in the XX century Bahia. Additionally, the research aims to comprehend the formation and modification of Pastinhas subjectivity while being in-between two very dynamic poles of knowledge: the letter and the ginga, or the writing and the capoeira. One of the assumptions underlying this research is that Mestre Pastinha contributed to the design of one form of the racial democracy in Bahia and Brazil. However, paradoxically, its trajectory also made visible some controversial limits of that national imagination. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 13/00578-2 - Making Latin America: literature and anthropology in the founding of Latin American imagination
• Grantee: Jorge Mauricio Herrera Acuña
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate