Keywords
Cultural memory
Orlanda Amarílis
Music
Dance
How to Cite
Abstract
This article aims to demonstrate that musical and choreographic practices operate as devices of cultural memory and as vectors of identity (re)construction in the Cape Verdean diaspora, drawing on Orlanda Amarílis’s short stories “Rodrigo” and “Thonon-les-Bains”. Engaging with scholarship on diaspora, memory, and identity, it argues that Cape Verdean cultural elements constitute figures of memory which, when performed in diasporic contexts, reactivate and complexify Cape Verdean identity rendering it hybrid and transnational. In “Rodrigo”, such practices consolidate community bonds and expose internal fissures in the eponymous protagonist between the memory of the homeland and local life; in “Thonon-les-Bains”, Piedade’s embodied assertion of difference triggers violence and makes visible tensions of belonging within the Cape Verdean diasporic experience. It concludes that Amarílis stages a diasporic identity in permanent negotiation, shaped by the circulation, inscription, and conflict of cultural memory.
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