Cape Verde, Let's Go: Creole Rappers and Citizenship in Portugal (Interp Culture New Millennium) - Softcover

Pardue, Derek

Softcover

ISBN 10: 025208117X ISBN 13: 9780252081170

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2015

Synopsis

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, Derek Pardue introduces Lisbon's kriolu rap scene and its role in challenging metropolitan Portuguese identities. Pardue 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 he 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.

Deftly shifting from domestic to public spaces and from social media to ethnographic theory, Pardue describes an overlooked phenomenon transforming Portugal, one sure to have parallels in former colonial powers across twenty-first-century Europe.

About this title

About the Author

Derek Pardue is an assistant professor in the Department of Culture and Society at Aarhus University and author of Ideologies of Marginality in Brazilian Hip Hop.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 025208117X
• ISBN 13: 9780252081170
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208