Abstract

This project aims to complement and develop recent research on Cape Verdeanity objectification processes for tourism purposes and handicraft production practice and discourse. The project has two research phases. The first,  to be carried out in the first three years, will focus on the examination of handicraft production and analyze how these artefacts depict the nation; how, why and by whom they are selected; and how they reproduce or contradict depictions forged in the colonial period. The second phase, to be carried out in the second triennium, will focus on the consumption of these objects by one of its largest consumers: the Cape Verdean diaspora. The aim here is to register and analyze object typologies and their meaning as identity markers in the processes of reconstructing Cape Verdeanity. These two research phases will combine to enable the artefacts to be traced from the workshops where they are produced to their consumers’ homes, and thus detect any continuities or ruptures in the meanings attributed to them as icons of the nation.