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The postcolonial politics of post-national citizenship in Portugal 

Review by David Kerr 

 

Verde, Let's Go: Creole Rappers and Citizenship in Portugal  

by Derek Pardue 

University of Illinois Press, 2015 

 

Cape Verde, Let's Go addresses the postcolonial politics of citizenship in Portugal through the lens of 

Creole rap. It examines how Creole challenges what it means to be Portuguese and shapes notions of 

identity and belonging. The unique historical interactions between Portugal and Cape Verdeans, as well 

as the subsequent creation of Creole identities, provides the central empirical framework for this book.  

Pardue argues for a Creole identity distinct from one-dimensional notions of hybridity and mixing. 

Instead, for Pardue, Creole identity encompasses history, alterity and power. Drawing on a range of 

theories from a variety of academic disciplines the book is ambitious in scope. Speaking to issues of 

both “theoretical conclusions and policy deliverables” (37) it examines the materiality of labour and 

housing as well as the poetics of creative expression. Crucial to the books multiple arguments is the 

conception that citizenship emerges from a set of practices and social relationships and not solely from 

a set of legal rights administered by the state. To address these issues Pardue engages with a diverse 

range of texts from the lyrics of Kriolu rap, the text of novels and the work of African intellectuals. 

Engaging critical debates about contemporary forms of citizenship, Pardue’s book raises important 

questions about how citizenship is conceptualised and how creative expression can be used to examine 

wider ideas of European intercultural citizenship. It addresses the vital issue of whether Creole 

citizenship offers a viable model for a contemporary mode of post-national citizenship. 

 

A major argument in the book is that the creative use of Cape Verdean Creole, a language that emerged 

through the encounter between West Africans and the Portuguese colonial powers, interrupts grand 



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state narratives of luso inclusion and conviviality. This notion of a unique luso relationship between 

metropolitan centre and colonial periphery has historically been employed by the Portuguese state to 

address colonialism and its legacy. Lusotropicalism a concept coined by Brazilian sociologist Gilberto 

Freyre and adopted by the colonial state of Portuguese dictator Salazar, posited a distinctive empathetic 

Portuguese imperialism based upon racial mixing as a key component of Portuguese national character. 

After the fall of the dictatorship, Lusofonia, a term that seeks to incorporate the heterogeneity of 

populations that constitute contemporary Portugal based on a common language and the Creole mixing 

of European modernity and African culture, has been invoked by the Portuguese state. State 

immigration, housing and labour policies directed towards migrants of African origin in Portugal 

contrast with these inclusive luso narratives have been, as this book shows, rather more exclusionary. 

Pardue argues that Creole rap disrupts these narratives through its evocation of histories of migration, 

labour and race. In so doing, Kriolu rap constructs “alternative subject positions and linguistic-cultural 

communities in relation to tuga and, thus, dislodge conventional notions of what it is to be Portuguese 

at phenomenological and narrative levels” (92).  

 

The use of Kriolu is a means for asserting claims to both space and place. It acts as a mode through 

which to attribute meaning to place and to manage the migratory experience and what Pardue terms 

dis(em)placement, that is, managing the significance of multiple places. The Kriolu language has, he 

suggests, become a medium which carries Cape Verdian history. Articulations of place and time, of 

migration, of Lisbon’s poorer neighbourhoods and of Cape Verde form an important unit for analysing 

the meaning of Creole citizenship. The poetics, linguistic ingenuity and narrative of Kriolu rap do 

identity work, organising experience and giving meaning to place. Engaging with the linguistics of 

expression, the book argues that patterns of repetition create sedimentation establishing structures 

within linguistic expression. As such these Kriolu linguistic structures are articulations of the Cape 

Verdian migrant experience. The relationship between space such as the impoverished neighbourhoods 

in which Kriolu rappers live and the multiple temporalities of colonialism, migration and the future are 

interrogated through the Bakhtinian concept of the Creole chronotope. Using the concept of the 

chronotope the book explores how Kriolu shapes not only language but space, it is through Kriolu rap 

that the space of Lisbon occupied by Kriolu rappers is made and takes on flesh. State discourses and 

policies shape legal entitlements to citizenship and the material space of the city itself. Kriolu is a mean 

through which both citizenship and space are challenged and rearticulated by Cape Verdian migrants. 

Language and expressive culture are important elements of the participation and belonging in society, a 



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key facet of the conception of citizenship employed in this book. Creole rap is a medium through which 

the question of citizenship is performed. With migration, citizenship and belonging central questions in 

Europe, Pardue makes a bold argument for Creole citizenship as a contemporary mode of post-national 

citizenship, participation and belonging. Central to the argument of this book is the conception of Cape 

Verdian Creole experience of migrancy as an “episteme, a paradigm of being that is central to identity 

formation in the contemporary world” (27).  

 

Speaking to both scholars and policy makers, the book proposes Creole citizenship as a model for the 

history of encounters and the politics of difference. Arguing for the encounter as a new mode of 

viewing citizenship, in which Kriolu is not Portuguese nor Cape Verdian, but created through the 

encounter. A Creole citizenship situated at the intersection, in Portugal rather than of Portugal. The 

book engages with a diverse range of sources, theoretical debates and policy questions. Central to the 

book are arguments about citizenship rather than detailed ethnographic exploration of the means of 

production and circulation of popular music. Ethnographic vignettes of Kriolu rap production and 

performance serve to illustrate the overarching arguments of the book rather than providing an 

ethnographically deep and detailed account of Kriolu raps production. The debates to which this book 

contributes are largely those on migration, contemporary modes of belonging and citizenship, rather 

than debates in hip-hop or popular music studies.    

 

David Kerr is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Johannesburg currently working on Street 

Life, Urban Performance and Masculinity in Dar es Salaam. He completed his thesis entitled 

‘Performing the Self: Rappers, Urban Space and Identity in Dar es Salaam’ under the supervision of 

Professor Karin Barber at the University of Birmingham in 2014 and has published in The Journal of 

African Media Studies, Journal of African Cultural Studies and has an article forthcoming in Suomen 

Antropologi – journal of the Finish anthropological society.. 

 

 

 

© 2017 David Kerr 


