Popular music and cultural identity in the Cape Verdean post-Colonial diaspora

Abstract

Popular music is a powerful medium for representing, contesting, and negotiating changing cultural identities within shifting global diasporas. Music indexes continuity and change, sustains and renegotiates connection across transnational space, and reshapes generational relations. Popular music across the global Cape Verdean diaspora – spanning the archipelago, Europe, North America, and Africa – offers a vital musical dialogue on issues of memory, identity, race, and post-coloniality. Today’s newer musics, such as cabo-zouk and hip-hop, give voice to realities of diasporic youth within multi-ethnic urban communities of color in the Global North. Cape Verdean youth increasingly identify with a multi-ethnic, transnational black African diaspora, mostly urban-based, but often still retain Cape Verdean ethnic identity. Embracing Africa, their music today spurns Europe and rejects older lusophone frameworks inherited from the Portuguese colonial era.