Search results for ""Author Derek Pardue""

In 1997 the rap group Racionais MCs (the ‘Rational’ MCs) recorded the album Sobrevivendo no Inferno (Surviving in Hell), subsequently changing the hip-hop scene in São Paulo and firmly establishing itself as the point of reference for youth across Brazil. In an era when rappers needed to defend the very idea that their work was indeed music and a time when neighborhoods such as Capão Redondo, from where Racionais frontman Mano Brown hailed, often topped homicide statistics, Sobrevivendo empowered as it provoked. As one journalist noted, “the underworld of São Paulo’s working-class suburbs is dominated by cheap thrills and provides little space for representation.” Sobrevivendo changed all of that; a brutal but invigorating imagination was born. The lure of Sobrevivendo is the particular combination of word and sound that powerfully involves listeners, especially those millions of young Brazilians who live in the neighborhoods on the periphery of Brazil’s megacities. This book celebrates the 25-year anniversary of Sobrevivendo by representing the album’s power not only within the hip-hop community but also in other cultural domains such as cinema and literature. The author also provides his own narrative spins on the sentiment of Sobrevivendo, thus making the book a creative mix of cultural analysis and inspired testimony.

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Musicians rapping in kriolu--a hybrid of Portuguese and West African languages spoken in Cape Verde--have recently emerged from Lisbon's periphery. They popularize the struggles with identity and belonging among young people in a Cape Verdean immigrant community that shares not only the kriolu language but its culture and history. Drawing on fieldwork and archival research in Portugal and Cape Verde, Derek Pardue introduces Lisbon's kriolu rap scene and its role in challenging metropolitan Portuguese identities. Pardue demonstrates that Cape Verde, while relatively small within the Portuguese diaspora, offers valuable lessons about the politics of experience and social agency within a postcolonial context that remains poorly understood. As he argues, knowing more about both Cape Verdeans and the Portuguese invites clearer assessments of the relationship between the experience and policies of migration. That in turn allows us to better gauge citizenship as a balance of individual achievement and cultural ascription.Deftly shifting from domestic to public spaces and from social media to ethnographic theory, Pardue describes an overlooked phenomenon transforming Portugal, one sure to have parallels in former colonial powers across twenty-first-century Europe.

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Musicians rapping in kriolu--a hybrid of Portuguese and West African languages spoken in Cape Verde--have recently emerged from Lisbon's periphery. They popularize the struggles with identity and belonging among young people in a Cape Verdean immigrant community that shares not only the kriolu language but its culture and history. Drawing on fieldwork and archival research in Portugal and Cape Verde, Derek Pardue introduces Lisbon's kriolu rap scene and its role in challenging metropolitan Portuguese identities. Pardue demonstrates that Cape Verde, while relatively small within the Portuguese diaspora, offers valuable lessons about the politics of experience and social agency within a postcolonial context that remains poorly understood. As he argues, knowing more about both Cape Verdeans and the Portuguese invites clearer assessments of the relationship between the experience and policies of migration. That in turn allows us to better gauge citizenship as a balance of individual achievement and cultural ascription.Deftly shifting from domestic to public spaces and from social media to ethnographic theory, Pardue describes an overlooked phenomenon transforming Portugal, one sure to have parallels in former colonial powers across twenty-first-century Europe.

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