Kesha D. Fikes

This project describes how emigration informed social identification practices in the nine inhabited islands of the drought and famine prone Cape Verdean archipelago (1863-1975). It addresses how the colonial administration designed emigration legislation that determined which islands' inhabitants could partake in emigrations to the West as Portuguese nationals, and which islands' inhabitants had to partake in indentured emigrations to plantations in other Portuguese African colonies, as indigenous African subjects. The project specifies how local racialized discourses of civility and savagery legally rationalized island distinctions, and how these distinctions were configured in accordance with international migration policies and post-abolition labor codes.