Rui Cidra examines the different ways music and expressive practices have shaped the social memory of the Cape Verdean diaspora of the cacao and coffee plantations of São Tomé and Príncipe, as well as the diasporic identities of Cape Verdeans.

Cidra confronts two different types of discourses and musical practices aiming to remember São Tomé in postcolonial Cape Verde: the national narratives and public ceremonies of memorialisation that configure the experience as exile and suffering; and the vernacular narratives and musical repertoires of São Tomé’s indentured laborers and musicians that foreground the social life of the plantations, and the relationship between cultural practices and material conditions in a context of crisis and fragmentation.

Cidra received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the Universidade Nova in Lisbon, Portugal, and has since specialized in the fields of social and cultural anthropology, as well as musicology.

Free (a Valente Lecture)