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Musicians rapping in Kriolu—a hybrid of Portuguese and West African languages spoken in Cape Verde—have recently emerged from Lisbon's periphery. They popularize the struggles with identity and belonging among young people in a Cape Verdean immigrant community that shares not only the Kriolu language but its culture and history. Drawing on fieldwork and archival research in Portugal and Cape Verde, this book introduces Lisbon's Kriolu rap scene and the role of rap music in challenging metropolitan Portuguese identities. It demonstrates that Cape Verde, while relatively small within the Portuguese diaspora, offers valuable lessons about the politics of experience and social agency within a postcolonial context that remains poorly understood. As the book argues, knowing more about both Cape Verdeans and the Portuguese invites clearer assessments of the relationship between the experience and policies of migration. That in turn allows us to better gauge citizenship as a balance of individual achievement and cultural ascription.

Remaking Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina examines what it means to live a Muslim life amid the political ruptures, economic deprivation, and transformation of religious institutions in postsocialist, postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina. Popular representations of Muslim communities in Southeastern Europe have long featured simplistic images of Muslims’ lost faith, and of Islam as serving the interests of nationalism and identity politics. Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research, this book challenges these stereotypes. Through an exploration of the everyday experiences of several generations of Muslim men and women and against the backdrop of the turbulent postsocialist and postwar transformations, David Henig shows how living a Muslim life in rural Bosnia and Herzegovina is ordered and inscribed by deep relations of obligation and care with the living, the dead, and the divine that spans generations. His evocative study traces the manifestations of these relations from the intimate spheres of houses and village neighborhoods to the waiting room of an Islamic dream healer, from village mosques and outdoor prayers for rain to the “little Hajj” pilgrimage and commemorative sites for the Ottoman martyrs and those of the recent Bosnian war. This study makes a powerful contribution to our understanding of how religion and historical consciousness, interlocked through the rubric of exchange, is actively engaged to make sense of past tumultuous experiences and future-oriented expectations in the present.