Sounding Creole: The Politics of Cape Verdean Language, Music, and Diaspora

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the interrelationship of language and music in the complex cultural domain of Cape Verde and the Cape Verdean diaspora in West Africa, Europe, and North America. I illustrate how derogatory tropes of degeneracy, inferiority, and impurity applied to Creole languages and cultures (Creole exceptionalism) have prevented language parity between Portuguese, Cape Verde’s official colonial language, and Cape Verdean Creole (CVC), the vernacular of the country’s entire population. These tropes and their sociological implications are, ultimately, detrimental to efforts toward development in the country. I show that music, a safe and welcoming space for CVC, plays an integral role in preserving and promoting the language. The results of centuries-old exceptionalist beliefs include the historical association of women as closer to nature than to culture in the Cape Verdean context and the perception of CVC language and culture as similarly subaltern as compared to their European counterparts. While men have traditionally been the revered songwriters and cultural intellectuals in Cape Verde, on world music stages Cape Verdean women have had the lion’s share of success. I argue that this gender role reversal is largely due to the unique career of Cesária Évora. Drawing on discourse-centered analysis, I chart the elements of race, gender, and social class indexed by song texts into the sociopolitical world of which they are a part and analyze the fruitful interventions and subversions made by Cape Verdean women performers in discussions of womanhood, “Africanness,” and “Creoleness.” This study contributes to numerous ongoing scholarly debates in African diaspora studies and Creole studies, especially regarding the politics of representation, and offers one of the few existing comprehensive historical and ethnographic studies of language in music and of a Creole language specifically. Inherently political, the research for this dissertation has been accompanied by a decade-long project of social engagement advocating for the linguistic human rights of CVC speakers.