PHAIS Seminar Series Week 9: Professor Claire Warden and Professor Matthias Röhrig Assunção (History and LiFTS)

The PHAIS Seminar Series meets weekly in term time to discuss a paper by a visiting Philosopher, Historian, Art Historian or a member of our academic staff. This seminar is co-organised by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Literary Studies.

Katharine Cockin in Conversation with Claire Warden and Matthias Röhrig Assunção: Martial Arts and Emancipation

Professor Claire Warden, University of Loughborough, and Professor Matthias Röhrig Assunção, University of Essex

Martial arts make use of combat techniques without lethal weapons and are customarily associated with undue violence against others. Yet martial arts were also used as weapons of emancipation in a variety of historical contexts.

The conversation will start with brief examinations of martial arts (in particular ju-jitsu) as used by women in the context of the Suffragettes movement in Britain and capoeira developed by enslaved Africans and their descendants resisting oppression in Brazil during the 19th and early 20th centuries. A variety of sources, such as travel accounts, police reports, newspaper and magazine articles, theatre pieces, novels but also in drawings, paintings, engravings, lithographs, and photographs allows us to reconstruct that history. 

The introductions by the panel should allow developing a broader discussion with the audience about the relationship between bodily techniques, their socio-cultural meanings and the body politic. 

A core question to be addressed:  Is the broader political significance of martial arts shaped by the specificity of their bodily techniques or is it rather derived from their forms of social insertion, the associated cultural meanings and how they are mobilised or instrumentalised by historical subjects?

Biography

Claire Warden is Professor of Performance and Physical Culture at Loughborough University. Her research focuses on interdisciplinary modernisms, performance practices, and the intersection of sport and art. She has published widely in these areas, including, most recently, the co-edited Edinburgh Companion to Modernism in Contemporary Theatre (Edinburgh UP, 2023). She is also the co-founder of the Arts Council-funded Wrestling Resurgence collective and is a lead academic advisor for the All Party Parliamentary Group for Professional Wrestling.

https://www.lboro.ac.uk/schools/design-creative-arts/people/claire-warden/

Matthias Röhrig Assunção is professor of Latin American History at the University of Essex. His research deals with the history of slavery and post-emancipation society in Brazil, popular culture and the martial arts of the Black Atlantic. He is the author of Capoeira. The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art (2005), co-directed the documentary film Body Games. Capoeira and Ancestry (2014), and coordinates the bilingual website www.capoeirahistory.com and its associated channel www.youtube.com/c/capoeirahistory

Katharine Cockin is a professor in Literature, Film and Theatre Studies (LiFTS) and Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Literary Studies at the University of Essex.

The seminar will be delivered in person, but a Zoom link will be available for those who wish to attend remotely: https://essex-university.zoom.us/j/94042010171