Eleusio Filipe
University of Minnesota
Home country: Mozambique

I am currently a third year PhD student in Hispanic and Luso Brazilian Literatures and Linguistics in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the University of Minnesota. My proposed dissertation topic Popular Culture (Music), Identity, and Nationalism in Mozambique, 1950s-1989, which I will describe in great detail in the following pages, reflects my long-standing passion with music as a listener and dancer since my early childhood in Mozambique. Very early, I became aware that music had and continues to have the effect of creating different feelings on people such as sadness, sorrow, and happiness. Music is also instrumental in creating a sense of belonging to a larger community or nation, and of excluding others. As such, I recall the days when as a teenager I would stay long hours listening to Mozambican National Radio (Rádio Moçambique, RM) broadcasting Chimurenga songs from Zimbabwe, FRELIMO freedom songs and South African music (Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, Abdullah Ibrahim, etc.). This experience made me feel connected to the histories of national liberation struggles in the Southern African region and also embrace and associate myself with the anti-apartheid struggle. As a subject of study or academic inquiry, my interest in music was sparked by my readings of Karin Barber, African Popular Culture in my first year as a graduate student in the department of history, Veit Erlmann and David Coplan’s works on South African music, and Peter Wade’s Music, Race, and Nation: Música Tropical in Colombia. I became very fascinated with the kind of questions that these scholars raise and address in their works, particularly the intersection between music, identity and nation and during my eight month stay in Mozambique in 2004 I began to explore the same questions to see the similarities and differences in the Mozambican context.