Emigration and the Transnational Production of Difference from Cape Verde Kesha Fikes Abstract: Public imaginaries of the Cape Verdean subject are intimately connected to discussions of conflicted psychology and racial consciousness, where, for instance, "color politics" have been established as the privileged mode of inquiry for questions addressing Cape Verdean cultural cohesion. With over a hundred years of printed criticism produced and circulated outside of Cape Verde - including Portuguese colonial ethnographies of the unstable emotional and cultural destiny of the Cape Verdean mulato, and Freyre's 1950s assessment of Cape Verde as occupying the infant stages of Brazil's miscegenation process - the Cape Verdean subject is popularly recognized as being disconnected from its political and psychic reality. This paper neither seeks apologies for such representations, or support for what is perceived as the state of the Cape Verdean racial psyche. Instead, the objective is to question those things/processses which are served or constituted through the representation of such inter-subjective conflict. Importantly, parallel, camouflaged discourses exist and they are made recognizable through conflicted public imaginaries of Cape Verdean raciality. As such, this discussion proposes questions that suggest alternative readings regarding the significance or strategic consequences of these discourses. Consider the following: Have perceptions of Cape Verdean racial subjectivity facilitated the ways in which transnational capital markets and surveillance technologies are able to materially manifest, embody and disseminate the limits of difference, via the historic diasporic mobility and "racial uncertainty" of the traveling Cape Verdean subject? |