ISLANDS OF SEXUALITY: THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CREOLIZATION IN CAPE VERDE.

HUMAN sexuality; COLONIES; ISLANDS

The essay examines the role of sexuality in the creolization process, which began to develop in the Cape Verde islands shortly after settlement in the fifteenth century. It does not account for the role sexuality played in the making of colonial Cape Verde per se, but rather focuses on the interpretive use of sexuality as a mechanism or metaphor to explain the singularity of creolization in Cape Verde. The process of creolization in Cape Verde and elsewhere is not merely an encounter between two or more cultures that results over time in the formation of a new culture with its own internal logic and coherence. Creolization is here defined as a creative process crafted from the tensions of colonial societies, subverting the daily practice of colonialism in many social domains. This essay also suggests that colonial ideologies in this case the use of sexuality to explain the formation of Creole identities were not fabrications of a distant metropole to be exported, consumed, and contested in the colonies.