Contact Information
Biography Information
Carla Martin, a Massachusetts native, is a doctoral candidate in Harvard University’s Department of African and African American Studies in the discipline of social anthropology, with a secondary field in ethnomusicology. During the 2011-2012 academic year, she is in residence as a Fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, as she completes her dissertation, “Sounding Creole: The Politics of Cape Verdean Language, Music, and Diaspora.” Carla’s regional interests include Africa, especially Cape Verde and formerly Portuguese Africa, the African Diaspora, North America, and South Asia, and her theoretical interests center on the study of language and music, Creole studies, race, gender and sexuality, popular culture and media, the politics of representation, anthropological ethics, education, digital humanities, and applied scholarship. For several years, she has worked with Cape Verdean communities in Africa, Europe, and the United States on a variety of research and civic engagement projects. Her writing and translation work has been published in Transition Magazine, Sodade Magazine, and The Savannah Review (forthcoming). Carla is also involved in research on chocolate, culture, and the politics of food, and is a frequent blogger on her website Bittersweet Notes (www.bittersweetnotes.com). She has taught extensively in African and African American Studies, social anthropology, and ethnomusicology, and has been awarded the Derek C. Bok Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Teaching of Undergraduates in addition to five Certificates of Distinction in Teaching. She received an A.M. in Anthropology in 2007 and an A.B. in Anthropology in 2003, both from Harvard University.
Project Description
This project focuses on sociolinguistic attitudes toward the Cape Verdean Creole (CVC) language, particularly as these attitudes are negotiated through Cape Verdean music in Cape Verde and the diaspora. The central question is: How do music and language sustain one another and bind together Cape Verde and its large diaspora, both socially and sonically? The project investigates musical dialogues that are conducted in CVC by artists and audiences and that promote an overwhelmingly positive image of CVC in Cape Verdean culture. It explores the boundaries of “Creole Exceptionalism,” the widespread and often harmful belief that “Creole languages form an exceptional class on phylogenetic and/or typological grounds” (DeGraff 2005:533). I extend DeGraff’s impeccable critique and “Foucauldian genealogy” of Creole Exceptionalism in linguistic scholarship to a critique in the Cape Verdean public and academic spheres and in anthropological and ethnomusicological scholarship. Considering the numerous forces working against CVC, studying its celebrated role in music can provide insight into their mutually sustaining bond. My dissertation, based on research conducted in Cape Verde, Europe, and the US, will present one of the first full-scale ethnographies of a Creole language and also the first musical ethnography focusing primarily on the relationship between language and music. This research aims to proliferate postcolonial approaches to the study and representation of Creole languages, art forms, and societies. Its broader implications include potential progressive social development (through education, social enfranchisement, and political participation) for Creole-speaking communities.