| Summary: | On the basis of fieldwork conducted in the Greater Boston area from May 2007 to May 2008, this dissertation explores the ways in which second-generation Cape Verdean youth in the Greater Boston area negotiate their identity as Cape Verdean and, by extension, as black through multiple articulations of diaspora. Using the ethnographic method this dissertation attempts to understand processes of racialization of "blackness." My objective is to examine how racialization works to
create black identities and to challenge the assumptions that black people do not actively participate in the discourses and practices of racial identity formation. I argue that Cape Verdean youth identities are constructed out of a process of negotiation and contestation, but the negotiation and contestation is stunted by the racial logic of the U.S.; a logic that configures blacks one-dimensionally. In doing so, I examine how North American ascriptions of blackness and forms of black
popular culture inform processes of identity formation and negotiation among Cape Verdean youth. I investigate the expressive forms of Cape Verdean youth culture, paying particular attention to hip-hop culture to see how it is used as a site where new (or old) identities of being Cape Verdean are fashioned and reworked within the contemporary socio-cultural context of race in the early 21st century. I map the interplay between structuring experience and individual choice by wider
historical and social factors. In short, this dissertation is focused on the mysterious workings of race and how Cape Verdean youth think and feel their identities into palpable everyday existence, while keeping in mind the dynamics and politics of racialization.
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