Vinicius Venancio de Sousa

VINICIUS SOUSA, then a graduate student at University of Brasilia, Brasilia, Brazil, was awarded funding in October 2022 to aid research on “Is Praia a Bad Mother, but a Good Stepmother? Circulations, Sociabilities and Belonging among West African Women in the Cape Verdean Capital,” supervised by Dr. Andréa de Souza Lobo. During the fieldwork conducted with funding from the project, research efforts were directed toward two main fronts: 1) updating and complementing the data obtained from West African women living in the Cape Verdean capital about their lives and histories, which focused on big events such as Africa Day (May 25th), African Women’s Day (July 31st), and a wedding of Bissau-Guinean immigrants; and 2) retrieving data from the colonial archives in Lisbon that not only could explain the impact of Portuguese colonialism on the ongoing production of difference between Cape Verdeans and Africans on the continent, but also could dismantle the hegemonic narrative that immigration to the archipelago with a recent fact in its history. From this dual perspective based on an intersectional perspective, the understanding about the dynamics of mobility, belonging, and anti-blackness that shaped the lives of the researcher’s interlocutors — women from countries such as Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, Togo — could be deepened. Thus, the specificities experienced by those immigrant women could be highlighted not only in the current context of the research, but also in a historical dimension.