Dr. Celina de Sá
I am a cultural anthropologist and assistant professor in Anthropology, affiliated with the African and African Diaspora Studies Department, the Tereza Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, and the Performance as Public Practice Program at the University of Texas at Austin. I completed my PhD with distinction from the University of Pennsylvania in a joint program between Africana Studies and Anthropology. My scholarship theorizes race and performance that reconsiders how West Africa is situated in relation to the African Diaspora. I am a heritage speaker of Brazilian Portuguese. I have also developed fluency in French, and achieved an intermediate level in reading, writing, and speaking in Wolof.
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My current research looks at Spain’s Black past and present through the varied search for the African elements of flamenco. Now known as the national dance and a symbol of how the Roma presence marks Andalusia as a racialized region, flamenco is also evidence of the diverse groups of West and West Central Africans that have been in Spain for centuries. My work will document how the renewed interest in uncovering the Black origins of Spain intersects with the influx of Senegalese migration in the last ten years.
Photo by: Lordibra
My first project dealt with the Afro-Brazilian combat game, capoeira, in which I wrote about the first capoeira schools founded by West Africans. Primarily focused on francophone countries, my ethnographic fieldwork over 20 months and including 54 interviews in Senegal, Togo, Benin, Ivory Coast and The Gambia culminated in a book manuscript currently under contract with Duke University Press titled, Diaspora Without Displacement: The Coloniality and Promise of Capoeira in Senegal. I have published an article in Transforming Anthropology titled, “Playing with Origins: Racial Self-Making and Embodying History in Togolese Capoeira” and have written think-pieces for American Ethnologist and Cultural Anthropology.