Rui Cidra

Voicing diasporic subjects: funaná and the expressive economy of badiu Cape Verdean masculinity in Lisbon

Funaná, a Cape Verdean music and dance genre formed in the island of Santiago in the late Nineteenth Century, travelled to Portugal with the first waves of labour migrations from that island in the early 1970s. In contrast with other Cape Verdean music and dance expressions performed in the country, made publicly visible through their circulation across the world music and Lusofonia markets, funaná’s performance has been primarily confined to the participatory contexts of community, kinship and friendship taking place in the predominantly Cape Verdean neighborhoods of the Greater Lisbon Area. In the paper I address the role played by funaná’s expressive practices in the articulation of Santiaguense (or badiu) diasporic identities. I place the genre’s performance within a transnational social field connecting Santiago’s interior, Cape Verde’s capital Praia, Lisbon and other locations of the Cape Verdean diaspora in Europe. I focus on the cultural work performed by funaná’s poetics, aesthetics and socialities in shaping a racialized masculinity shared by Santiaguense labour migrants in Portugal.

Rui Cidra is a postdoctoral researcher at the Instituto de Etnomusicologia (INET, md), Lisbon, and invited assistant Professor of the music department of the Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. His most recent research addresses the Cape Verdean music and dance genre funaná, and the production of the Santiaguense creole masculinity.