Islands of sexuality: Theories and histories of creolization in Cape Verde

International Journal of African Historical Studies

Volumn 36, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 83-104

  Rodrigues, Isabel P B Fêo ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949863989     PISSN: 03617882     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3559320     Document Type: Review

References (72)

1. My use of "trope" derives from James W. Fernandez Persuasionsand Performances: The Play of Tropes in Culture (Bloomington, Ind., 1986).
2. For comparative examples of creolization see Lionel Caplan, "Creole World, Purist Rhetoric: Anglo-Indian Cultural Debates in Colonial and Contemporary Madras, " Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1, 4(1995), 743-62.
3. For a comprehensive analysis of how métissage undermined theboundaries of rule within French Indochina, see Ann Laura Stoler "Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Southeast Asia, " in Avtar Brah and Annie Coombes, eds., Hybridity and Its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture (London, 2000), 19-55.
4. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, 2002),
5. and Stoler, "Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communitiesand the Boundaries of Rule, " Comparative Studies in Society and History 13, 1 (1991), 134-61. Her analysis of sexuality and colonial fear of miscegenationcomprises a theoretical attempt to destabilize conceptions of colonialism as acoherent system.
6. Roger Bastide, Brancos e Negros em São Paulo (São Paulo, 1955) was one of the leading scholars to see the significance of racial mixturein Brazil and to associate this mixture with African creativity in the New World. France Windance Twine, Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil (New Brunswick, N.J., 1997) examines the legacy ofrace relations and racial mixture in contemporary Brazil in relation to the lackof a strong black movement capable of mobilizing politically against racialdiscrimination.
7. John Burdick, Blessed Anastácia: Women, Race, and Popular Christianity in Brazil (New York, 1998) critiques the view that racial mixturein Brazil ultimately serves the interest of embranquecimento or the ideologicalwhitening of the population.
8. Donna Goldstein, "Interacial Sex and Racial Democracy in Brazil:Twin Concepts?" American Anthropologist 101, 3 (1999), 563-78, explicitlyarticulates the myth of racial democracy with sexuality.
9. Gilberto Freyre, O Luso e o Trópico (Lisbon, 1961);
10. Gilberto Freyre, Casa-Grande and Senzala (Rio de Janeiro, 1946).
11. Cláudia Castelo, O Modo Português de Estar no Mundo. OLusotropicalismo e a Ideologia Colonial Portuguesa (1933-1961) (Porto, 1998);
12. "Lusotropicalisme, Idéologies Coloniales et Identités Nationales dans les Mondes Lusophones, " Lusotopie; Enjeux Contemporainsdans les Espaces Lusophones (Paris, 1997), 195-178.
13. Castelo, O Modo Português de Estar no Mundo.
14. Alfred Louis Kroeber, The Nature of Culture (Chicago, 1952).
15. Freyre, O Luso e o Trópico, 50. Unless otherwise noted, all Portuguese texts were translated into English by the author.
16. Adriano Moreira and José Carlos Venâncio Luso-Tropicalismouma Teoria Social em Questão (Lisbon, 2000) for a discussion of Freyre'sthought in light of contemporary politics and scholarship, particularly in Portugal.
17. Gilberto Freyre, Aventura e Rotina. Sugestões de Uma Viagemà Procura das Constantes Portuguesas de Carácter e Acção [1951] (Rio de Janeiro, 1980), 243.
18. Baltasar Lopes, Cabo Verde visto por Gilberto Freyre (Praia, 1956) and Manuel Ferreira, A Aventura Crioula (Lisbon, 1967).
19. See the introduction to Ferreira, A Aventura Criola.
20. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, "Between Metropole and Colony, " in Cooper and Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Culturesin a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, 1996), 1-55;
21. Cooper and Stoler, "Tensions of Empire: Colonial Control and Visionsof Rule, " American Ethnologist (1989), 609-21.
22. Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York, 1992), provides a philosophical and biographical critique ofthe simplistic equation of race and culture which has characterized politicaldiscourse and the multiple forms through which Africa is represented andessentialized as "Black."
23. Ana María Alonso, "The Politics of Space, Time, and Substance: State Formation, Nationalism, and Ethnicity, " Annual Review of Anthropology 23, (1994), 379-105.
24. Alexandre Valentim, "Nação e Império, " in Francisco Bethencourt and Kirty Chaudhury, eds., História da Expansão Portuguesa (Lisbon, 1998), 90-142. Valentim demonstrates how the"African question" became intertwined with Portuguese nationalsurvival. Perceptions of national vulnerability and "loss" of Africanterritories to other Europeans propelled this nationalistic fusion of Africa and Portugal.
25. Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture:An Anthropological Perspective (Boston, 1976), have insisted on the analysis ofculture change by concentrating on the creativity and agency of those whofounded maroon societies (quilombos) and who forged novel ways to survive in the New World through creolization processes. Their argument is relevant to theways Creole spaces can be conceptualized in Cape Verde.
26. The key literature on contact and creolization includes Melville Herskovits The Myth of the Negro Past (Boston, 1941);
27. Roger Bastide, Brancos e Negros em São Paulo (São Paulo, 1955),
28. Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African American Culture: AnAnthropological Perspective (Boston, 1976);
29. Richard Price, "Modernity, Memory, Martinique, " and Sally Price, "The Centrality of Margins: Art, Gender and African-American Creativity, " both in Isidoro Okpewho, Carole Boyce Davies, and Ali A.Mazrui, eds., The African Diaspora (Bloomington, Ind., 1999) 76-88 and 204-226respectively;
30. Lorand J. Matory, "The English Professors of Brazil - On the Diasporic Roots of the English Nation, " Comparative Studies of Society and History (1994), 72-103;
31. Ulf Hannerz, "The World in Creolization, " Africa 57 (1987), 543-60.
32. and Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning(New York, 1992). Anthropologists have also been forced to rethink the Boasiantradition of studying places and peoples as if contained by integrated cultures.
33. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, eds., Culture, Power, Place. Explorationsin Critical Anthropology (Durham, N.C., 1997).
34. Finally, creolization studies have been influenced by cultural studiesand postcolonial studies. See Stuart Hall, "The Local and the Global:Globalization and Ethnicity" and "Old and New Identities, " bothin Anthony D. King, ed., Culture, Globalization and the World System:Contemporary Condition for the Representation of Identity (Minneapolis, 1997), 19-39 and 41-68.
35. Hannerz, "The World in Creolization."
36. Alonso, "The Politics of Space, Time and Substance, " 379-405.
37. Elizabeth Colson, Tradition and Contract: The Problem of Order (Chicago, 1974), noted that innovation in the colonies was often invented on the spotunder the guise of tradition in order to legitimate particular actions andpolicies.
38. Edwin Ardner, "The Construction of History: Vestiges of Creation, " and Roger Just, "Triumph of Ethnos, " both in Elizabeth Tonkin, M. McDonald, and M. Chapman, eds., History and Ethnicity (London, 1989), 22-33 and 71-88;
39. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983).
40. Terence Ranger and Richard Werbner, eds., Postcolonial Identities in Africa (London, 1995).
41. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1979) was the main force inquestioning the Western representation of colonized subjects and the ways Western texts became the authoritative knowledge about the Muslim world.
42. Homi Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Desire, " in Cooper and Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire, 152-60,
43. and in The Location of Culture (New York, 1994) engages the question ofauthenticity and hybridity as colonial and postcolonial formations.
44. Cooper and Stoler, Tensions of Empire.
45. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness(Cambridge, 1993).
46. Ann Laura Stoler, "Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Southeast Asia, " in Brah and Coombes, eds., Hybridity and Its Discontents, 19-55.
47. Jeanne Penvenne, "'We Are All Portuguese!' Challenging the Political Economy of Assimilation: Lourenço Marques, 1870-1933, " in Leroy Vail, ed., The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (Berkeley, 1989), 262-69.
48. José Vicente Lopes, Cabo Verde os Bastidores da Indepêndencia (Praia, 1995). This is one of the most comprehensive workscoming from the Capeverdean perspective on the independence movement that joined Guiné-Bissau and Cape Verde.
49. See also Pedro Martins, Testemunho de um Combatente (Praia, 1995).
50. According to Norrie Mac Queen, General Spinola thought that the unity of Guiné-Bissau and Cabo Verde proposed by Amilcar Cabral was a mere warstrategy to legitimate Capeverdean commanding positions in Guiné-Bissau.Mac Queen, The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa: Metropolitan Revolution andthe Dissolution of Empire (London, 1997).
51. Deirdre Meintel Race, Culture, and Portuguese Colonialism in Cabo Verde(Syracuse, 1984);
52. Bently Duncan, Atlantic Islands: Madeira, the Azores and the Cape Verdesin Seventeenth Century Commerce and Navigation (Chicago, 1972).
53. George Brooks, Landlords and Strangers: Ecology, Society, and Trade in Western Africa (Boulder, Colo., 1993), 180.
54. António Carreira, Cabo Verde: Formação e Extinção de uma Sociedade Escravocrata (1460-1878) (Lisbon, 1972).
55. For a recent sociolinguistic study of the genesis of creole languages in West Africa, see John H. McWhorter, The Missing Spanish Creoles: Recovering the Birth of Plantation Contact Languages (Berkeley, 1999).
56. For specific studies of Capeverdean Creole, see Baltasar Lopes, ODialecto Crioulo de Cabo Verde (Lisbon, 1957).
57. For the specifics of island-based Creole and its constant revitalizationthrough contact and migration, see Deirdre A. Meintel, "The Creole Dialectof the Island of Brava, " in Marius Volkhoff, ed., Miscelania Luso-Africana(Lisbon, 1975), 205-56.
58. Jean-Louis Rougé "Apontamentos Sobre o Léxico de Origem Africana dos Crioulos da Guiné e de Cabo Verde (Santiago), "in Klaus Zimmerman, ed., Lenguas Criollas de Base Lexical Española y Portuguesa, (Madrid, 1999), 49-66, provides detail of internal Creoledevelopments in Cape Verde.
59. António Carreira, Cabo Verde: Classes Sociais, Estrutura Familiar, Migrações (Lisbon, 1977), 21-32.
60. Quote from Norman R. Bennett and George E. Brooks, Jr., New England Merchants in Africa: A History through Documents 1802-1865 (Boston, 1965), 15-17.
61. George E. Brooks, Yankee Traders, Old Coasters, and African Middlemen: AHistory of American Legitimate Trade in the Nineteenth Century (Boston, 1970), 132-79.
62. Ira Berlin, "From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America, " William and Mary Quarterly 53, 2 (1996), 251-88.
63. See also John Thorton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (Cambridge, 1992), for the place of Creoles and West Africanagency through trade and political alliances.
64. José Conrado Chelmichi and Francisco Adolfo Varnhagen, Corografia Caboverdiana ou Discrição Geographico-Historica da Provínciadas Ilhas de Cabo Verde (Costa do Castelo, 1841), 196.
65. Elisa Silva Andrade, Les Îles du Cap-Vert de la"dé couverte" à l'indépendance nationale, 1460-1975 (Paris, 1996), 58-59. Andrade points out the existence of colonialcontinuities and racist ideologies among a "certain" Capeverdean elitewho have downplayed the African cultural elements of Capeverdean culture.
66. Charles Boxer, Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire 1415-1825(London, 1963), 13.
67. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, "Beyond Culture: Space, Identity andthe Politics of Difference, " in their Culture, Power, and Place, 1-29.
68. Mendes Correa, Raças do Império, (Porto, 1943), 308.Gilberto Freyre was aware of his work and visited with him during his tour ofthe lusophone world in 1951.
69. Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race(London, 1995).
70. Angela Guimarães, Bordallo (Lisbon, 1997), 112-13.
71. Alonso, "The Politics of Space."
72. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, "Africa Observed: Discourses of the Imperial Imagination, " in Roy Richard Grinker and Christopher B. Steiner, eds., Perspectives on Africa: A Reader in Culture, History, and Representation(Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 698.