The Conservative Aspects of a Centripetal Diaspora: The Case of the Cape Verdean Tabancas

Africa ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 79 (4) ◽  
pp. 520-542 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wilson Trajano Filho
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Social Life ◽  
West African ◽  
Cape Verde ◽  
General Context ◽  
Cape Verdean ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Anthropological Literature ◽  
Ethnographic Analysis ◽  
Analytical Tools

This article deals with the continuous flow of resources, values and goods that takes place within a Cape Verdean institution called tabanca. It examines the effects of some practices of the so-called Cape Verdean diaspora on local forms of sociality in Santiago's tabancas, in order to show that these flows have a remarkable conservative tendency and contribute to the reproduction of traditional forms of social organization. The Cape Verde I present in this article is at variance with the standard image of the country in current anthropological literature, which approaches social life in the archipelago using analytical tools developed in interdisciplinary fields such as globalization theory and post-colonial, transnational or diasporic studies. Through the ethnographic analysis of the flows within the tabanca, I put the Cape Verde case in the general context of West African political culture to argue that some of its attributes, which appear in literature on transnationalism, diaspora and globalization as the outcome of contemporary transformation, can best be explained in terms of a conservative structural continuity with the political culture that evolved in the northern part of West Africa, known as Senegambia.

Mimesis and the Historical Imagination: (Re)Staging History in Cape Verde, West Africa

2008 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTINA S. MCMAHON
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Local History ◽  
West African ◽  
Cape Verde ◽  
Historical Imagination ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Cape Verdean ◽  
Global Performance ◽  
Theoretical Paradigms

This article examines what is at stake when performers and playwright critically transfigure oral histories when staging them theatrically. Representations of race and colonial history are integral to a nation's conception of its own cultural identity. These issues are at the forefront of many theatre productions in Cape Verde, an intensely creolized West African nation whose islands bear traces of the Europeans and Africans who have commingled there for centuries. The article examines two performances rooted in Cape Verdean history that challenge existing theoretical paradigms for the mimetic relationship between actors and the historical personae they portray onstage. Proposing the concept of the ‘historical imagination’, it explores how theatre artists self-consciously alter the local history they circulate to an international theatre festival stage and, concomitantly, how the theatre festival context and media coverage profoundly impact how national history is told within a global performance arena.

FROM ADAPTATION TO TRANSFORMATION: SHAKESPEARE CREOLIZED ON CAPE VERDE'S FESTIVAL STAGE

2009 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina S. McMahon
Keyword(s):  
West African ◽  
Cape Verde ◽  
Cape Verdean ◽  
Cultural Center ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Good Taste ◽  
Theatre Company ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Artistic Director

This is a tale of two directors. The setting is the Republic of Cape Verde, a former Portuguese colony and a tiny archipelago nestled off the coast of Senegal in West Africa. Framing the story is Cape Verde's annual Mindelact International Theatre Festival, which since 1997 has invited Lusophone theatre artists from three continents to perform a wide array of theatre genres on a mainstage program alongside Cape Verdean troupes. João Branco, a Portuguese director who moved to the islands in the early 1990s, is the artistic director of both the Mindelact Festival and the veteran Cape Verdean theatre troupe GTCCPM (Grupo de Teatro do Centro Cultural Português do Mindelo/Theatre Group of the Mindelo Portuguese Cultural Center). For Mindelact 2003, GTCCPM performed an abridged version of King Lear rendered in Cape Verdean Crioulo, a mix of Portuguese and several West African languages. Beyond bolstering Branco's cherished goal of creolizing Shakespeare's plays by transporting them to Cape Verde's Afro-European cultural milieu, Rei Lear worked in concert with the festival's media blitz to extol local spectators in Mindelact's host city, Mindelo, for their good taste. Two years later, Herlandson Duarte, a young Cape Verdean director and Branco's former theatre student, staged a Crioulo-language Midsummer Night's Dream at Mindelact with his new theatre company, Solaris. Duarte's production transformed Bottom's play-within-a-play into a searing critique of Mindelense audiences and the structures of authority that prop up the festival itself.

A Place of History: Archaeology and Heritage at Cidade Velha, Cape Verde

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Louise Stig Sørensen ◽  
Christopher Evans ◽  
Konstantin Richter
Keyword(s):  
West African ◽  
Cape Verde ◽  
Cape Verdean ◽  
The West ◽  
Atlantic Trade ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
Archaeological Work ◽  
History Of ◽  
Local Residents ◽  
Historical Remains

Early depictions of Cidade Velha's sear-frontage show a thriving, well-appointed and heavily fortified town with architectural aspirations: ships ride at anchor, the cathedral and Bishop's Palace can be seen below the plateau-top fort on the east side of the valley, the harbour is ringed with batteries, behind which poke a number of two-storey residences and church towers. The crucial point is that, as the early capital of the Cape Verde Islands, located some 350 nautical miles off the West African coast and being Portugal's main transshipment centre for the trans-Atlantic trade, all this was carried on a slavery-based infrastructure. This chapter consists of three parts. First it outlines the history of slavery from a Cape Verdean perspective. Second, it discusses interviews conducted with the local residents as they indicate how the past of slavery may affect contemporary attitudes and the values associated with the historical remains. Third, it provides a brief summary of the archaeological work started in Cidade Velha.

Cape Verde, Let's Go

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Pardue
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Rap Music ◽  
West African ◽  
Cape Verde ◽  
Immigrant Community ◽  
Cape Verdean ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Individual Achievement ◽  
The Relationship

Musicians rapping in Kriolu—a hybrid of Portuguese and West African languages spoken in Cape Verde—have recently emerged from Lisbon's periphery. They popularize the struggles with identity and belonging among young people in a Cape Verdean immigrant community that shares not only the Kriolu language but its culture and history. Drawing on fieldwork and archival research in Portugal and Cape Verde, this book introduces Lisbon's Kriolu rap scene and the role of rap music in challenging metropolitan Portuguese identities. It demonstrates that Cape Verde, while relatively small within the Portuguese diaspora, offers valuable lessons about the politics of experience and social agency within a postcolonial context that remains poorly understood. As the book argues, knowing more about both Cape Verdeans and the Portuguese invites clearer assessments of the relationship between the experience and policies of migration. That in turn allows us to better gauge citizenship as a balance of individual achievement and cultural ascription.

scholarly journals Language Ideologies and Transnational Migration: A Study of Cape Verdeans in Galicia

Languages ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 99
Author(s):  
Nicola Bermingham
Keyword(s):  
Language Ideologies ◽  
Linguistic Diversity ◽  
Transnational Migration ◽  
Peripheral Region ◽  
Cape Verde ◽  
Minority Languages ◽  
Cape Verdean ◽  
Language Identity ◽  
Language Varieties ◽  
Symbolic Resource

Changes to the global infrastructure have contributed to the growing (linguistic) diversity of large metropolises. However, there have been calls from scholars to explore “emerging superdiversity” (DePalma and Pérez-Caramés 2018) in peripheral regions in order to fully understand the complexities and nuances of the sociolinguistics of globalisation (Wang et al. 2014; Pietikäinen et al. 2016). This article, therefore, explores language ideologies among a purposive sample of five young adults of Cape Verdean origin living in the peripheral region of Galicia, Spain, and draws on interview data to examine the ways in which multilingual migrants engage with the language varieties in their linguistic repertoire. In studying immigration from a former African colony to a bilingual European context, we can see how language ideologies from the migrant community are reflected in local ones. The sociolinguistic dynamics of Cape Verde and Galicia share many similarities: both contexts are officially bilingual (Galician and Spanish in Galicia, Kriolu and Portuguese in Cape Verde), and questions regarding the hierarchisation of languages remain pertinent in both cases. The ideologies about the value and prestige of (minority) languages that Cape Verdean migrants arrive with are thus accommodated by local linguistic ideologies in Galicia, a region which has a history of linguistic minoritisation. This has important implications for the ways in which language, as a symbolic resource, is mobilised by migrants in contexts of transnational migration. The findings of this study show how migrants are key actors in (re)shaping the linguistic dynamics of their host society and how, through their practices and discourses, they challenge long-standing assumptions about language, identity and linguistic legitimacy, and call into question ethno-linguistic boundaries.

Irish Demography in a Comparative Context: European Transition Theory vs. A Post-Colonial Understanding

1999 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy J. White
Keyword(s):  
Demographic Change ◽  
Demographic Transition ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Demographic History ◽  
Transition Theory ◽  
Vital Rates ◽  
Irish Society ◽  
Death Rates ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Demographic Patterns

While studies of Irish society have concentrated on the effects of colonialism on late industrialisation and Irish social life, less work has been done on the uniqueness of Irish demographic change and its connection to the country's colonial past. The present article argues that Ireland demographic history has more in common with post-colonial societies than with European states that went through the so-called demographic transition. Irish demographic patterns differ even from peripheral societies of Europe, primarily because its historic pattern of emigration allowed for a stable population despite relatively high birth rates and rapidly declining death rates. Ireland's recent economic success, however, has dramatically altered this historic pattern and its vital rates now correspond more closely to the pattern of European countries that experienced an early demographic transition.

scholarly journals Off-the-Grid Life of Arctic Nomads: Social Generating of Electricity in the Northern Yamal

2019 ◽  
pp. 1356-1373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dmitry V. Arzyutov
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Field Data ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
Yamal Peninsula ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ethnographic Analysis ◽  
The Yamal Peninsula

This article deals with the ethnographic analysis of the history and social life of electricity among Nenets in the Yamal Peninsula. Based on historical documents and field data the author reconstructs a history of the electrification of the northern part of the peninsula. This work also includes the reflections on social and cultural meanings of electricity among Nenets in and out the tundra. Through these historical and current dynamics, the author suggests analysing the life of electricity in off-the-grid settings through the lens of transnational technological entanglements in the Arctic

scholarly journals Security Challenges for Small Island Developing States: The Case of Cape Verde

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-177
Author(s):  
João Paulo Madeira
Keyword(s):  
Regional Cooperation ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Cape Verde ◽  
Small Island ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
Cape Verdean ◽  
Small Island Developing States ◽  
Security Issues ◽  
Security Challenges ◽  
Integration Mechanisms

This article is an exploratory, descriptive study, with a qualitative and interdisciplinary approach. It integrates concepts and perspectives of contemporary history, international relations, and security studies. Its main aim is to analyse security issues in Africa, taking as a reference the Cape Verde archipelago, which is part of the group of Small Island Developing States. This matter suggests a wider multidimensional approach that prioritizes the intersection of data obtained from a critical analysis in order to deepen regional cooperation and integration mechanisms. This can provide the Cape Verdean state with strategic options to prevent and mitigate potential security threats.

Fragments Towards an Impossible (Domestic) Genre of the Human in Kenyan Crime Fiction

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 99-119
Author(s):  
Wairimũ Mũrĩithi
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
International Media ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

Extrajudicial executions and other forms of police violence in Kenya have always been an issue of significant concern in local and international media and human rights organisations. Reflective of this, scholarly interest in crime fiction in Kenya has grown significantly in recent years. However, the gendered implications of criminality – from sex work to errant motherhood to alternative modes of investigation – are still largely overlooked in postcolonial literary fiction and criticism. As part of a larger study on how women writers and characters shape crime fiction in Kenya, this paper critically engages with stories that the criminalised woman knows, tells, forgets,  incarnates, discards or hides about the city. It does so by examining the history of urban sex workers in Kenya, the representation of ‘urban women’ in postcolonial Kenyan novels and contemporary mainstream media, and the various (post) colonial laws that criminalise sex work. Through Justina, an elusive character in Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust, I consider how (post)colonial legislative frameworks and social life attempt to manage “impossible domesticity” (Saidiya Hartman) inside and against the geo-history of gendered and classed criminality in urban Kenyan spaces. My purpose is to interrogate hegemonic constructions of the citizen – and by extension, of the human  – in Kenyan law and public morality Keywords: crime fiction, feminism, sex work, human, homo narrans

Epilogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 203-214
Author(s):  
António Tomás
Keyword(s):  
Armed Forces ◽  
Cape Verde ◽  
Cape Verdean ◽  
Coup D'etat ◽  
Military Forces ◽  
Colonial Empire

Having lost the war politically, with the independence of Guinea and the recognition of Guinean state by dozens of countries, Estado Novo was entering into a crisis of legitimacy. Members of the Portuguese military forces formed the Movement of Armed Forces, who lead the popular uprising against Marcelo Caetano on April 1974. The end of Estado Novo was not an automatic confirmation of the end of colonialism. But independence was inevitable. By the end of 1975, Portugal was no longer a colonial empire in Africa. Against Cabral’s desire, independence did bring the unity between Cope Verdeans and Guineans. Whereas Cape Verde was governed by an all- Cape Verdean government, Guinea had a few Cape Verdean in its government. The coup d’etat led by Nino Vieira against Cabral’s bother Luís Cabral has been considered the second death of Cabral.

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