Embodying diaspora: ambivalence and utopia in contemporary Cape Verdean theatre.

In September 2004, the Cape Verdean theatre group Dionisios performed Urn suco natural for the country's annual Mindelact International Theatre Festival. The piece commingled a traditional Cape Verdean dance form, batuque, with Western ballet, and enacted the Cape Verde Islands' ambivalent relationship with continental West Africa by alternately evoking and obscuring the memory of forced migration from the mainland five centuries earlier. In July 2005, Burbur, a Cape Verdean diaspora group based in Portugal, premiered O intruso, an adaptation of a classic Cape Verdean literary work, at four cafes in Oporto, Portugal. Confounding the idea of a diasporic identity defined exclusively by ties to a Cape Verdean homeland, O intruso featured moments of linguistic improvisation in Portuguese, Cape Verdean Crioulo, and indigenous Angolan languages. O intruso situates Cape Verdean national identity within the panoramic scope of Lusofonia, a utopic vision for a transnational community of Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) countries held together by a common language and colonial past.

Although these two troupes adopt divergent approaches to national identity, both use theatrical improvisation to disrupt traditional notions of diasporic culture. These improvisatory methods allow Cape Verdean performers to imagine the intellectual, cultural, and psychological landscape of "home" differently. Since the space of "home" constantly shifts among the Cape Verde Islands, mainland Africa, and Portugal, Burbur's and Dionisios's theatrical performances redefine "home" as solace in global circulation rather than in one stable place. This demands a more dynamic conception of diaspora than the standard formula of migration from homeland and resettlement in host country. (1) Analyzing diasporic relationships in tandem with performance compels us to think about diaspora as something enacted rather than merely espoused, as an act of doing rather than being, as a process rather than a product of migration. (2)

Historical Background

Cape Verde's unique history makes it a compelling case for diaspora studies. From the fifteenth to the late nineteenth century, Portuguese traders transported Africans from the Senegambian region of West Africa to the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Senegal, where some remained and others were "baptized and civilized" and reexported to various New World locations. (3) Because the islands were both a destination and a stopping-off point on the historical transatlantic slave route, Cape Verde's history has more resonance with the Caribbean islands, for example, than with countries on the African continent. (4) Portuguese colonial policy reinforced Cape Verde's disconnect with mainland Africa: Cape Verdeans were considered "assimilated" Portuguese citizens because their Creole complexions (a result of centuries of Africans and Europeans intermingling on the islands) made them look more "Portuguese." Thus, Cape Verdeans were accorded voting privileges and educational rights denied to colonial subjects in Portuguese colonies on mainland Africa (Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau). (5)

One of the legacies of this complex colonial past is that Cape Verdeans have historically asserted cultural distance from mainland Africa--a far cry from diasporic subjects who valorize and revere their African ancestry. Throughout much of the twentieth century, Cape Verdean intellectuals were reticent to situate themselves within any kind of pan-Africanist discourse. In the late 1930s, when Aime Cesaire coined the term negritude to designate a universal black aesthetic, Cape Verdean poets writing for the literary review Claridade were developing a more insular concept: Caboverdianidade (literally, "Cape Verdeanness"), a uniquely Cape Verdean cultural identity defined by the isolation of island-dwelling, the despair of persisting drought, and the conflicting desires to leave Cape Verde for one's own survival and to remain attached to one's beloved home. Only in the 1950s and 1960s did a new wave of thinkers, among them Manuel Duarte and Gabriel Mariano, urge Cape Verdeans to regard their culture as part of Africanidade, the oral traditions and folkloric music and dance from mainland Africa that "survived" in spite of forced removal to the islands and subsequent isolation from the African continent. (6)

Contemporary Cape Verdean performers embody these historically shifting articulations of national identity: from the insularity of Caboverdianidade, to the renewed links with other West African countries that arose during Cape Verde's liberation movement in the 1960s and 1970s, to the "globalization" of the Cape Verdean nation that accelerated in the 1960s, when, for example, Cape Verdeans increasingly migrated to Portugal in response to labor shortages resulting from Portugal's involvement in colonial wars in Africa. In their performances, Dionisios and Burbur employ kinesthetic and linguistic improvisation to flame Cape Verdean identity in terms of historical debates about Caboverdianidade, Africanidade, and Lusofonia, all of which demand different modes of remembering or forgetting historical migration from mainland West Africa to Cape Verde, and from the islands to diasporic communities in the West.

A "framing" approach to diaspora encompasses ambivalence toward homeland. (7) Dionisios's play Urn suco natural (Portuguese for "a natural essence or juice") is an AIDS education and outreach piece that also includes critical moments of dialogue and dance that alternately claim and relinquish cultural ties to continental Africa. Burbur's piece O intruso (Portuguese for "the intruder") is a theatrical adaptation of Cape Verdean author Gabriel Mariano's short story (1957) about a Cape Verdean family coming to terms with a deceased father and the man who replaces him. Because the actors from Burbur move fluently among Portuguese and national languages from Cape Verde and Angola, the performance illustrates how Cape Verdean performers in Portugal conceive of the entire Portuguese-speaking world as "home;' so the pain of leaving the islands is always compensated with the prospect of encountering utopia within any other Lusophone space.

These performances make visible the multiple phases of migration that constitute African diaspora communities. Joseph Harris calls these stages primary (the originary dispersal from Africa), secondary (movement from the first place of settlement to another one), tertiary (migration to yet another area abroad), and circulatory (movement among various areas abroad, including Africa). (8) Cape Verdean dancer and choreographer Antonio Tavares upholds this view of multiple migrations when he calls Cape Verde a "diaspora of a diaspora." (9) He explains that since African slaves were first exported to Santiago, Cape Verde's largest and most arable island, Santiago was Cape Verde's "first diaspora" When these slaves were later dispersed to other islands in the archipelago, where they were joined by European settlers, they constituted a "diaspora" of Santiago Island. Centuries of migration from all of the islands has produced multiple Cape Verdean diasporas in the United States and Europe, principally in Boston, Lisbon, and Rotterdam. These three waves of historical movement correspond strikingly to Harris's primary, secondary, and tertiary phases of migration.

The theatre artists from Dionisios and Burbur engage in the circulatory stage, since they move back and forth from Cape Verde, their birthplace, to Portugal. However, the way they represent Cape Verdean culture unveils critical perspectives on Cape Verde's earlier phases of migration. In Dionisios's Urn suco natural, director and playwright Paulo Miranda, a Cape Verdean attending university in Portugal, creates a performance that employs batuque dancing, considered a survival from the original dispersal from Africa. In Burbur's O intruso, Cape Verdean actors Odete Mosso and Flavio Hamilton work with Portuguese director Rui Duarte to craft a theatrical celebration of Lusofonia. O intruso commemorates Cape Verde's tertiary stage of migration, when Cape Verdeans seeking higher education attend university in Lisbon and Oporto, where they form communities with other Portuguesespeakers from the world over.

These performances are themselves products of theatrical circulation, since both have connections to Cape Verde's Mindelact International Theatre Festival. Founded in 1995 by Joao Branco, a Portuguese director, and Manuel Estevao, a Cape Verdean actor, Mindelact invites Cape Verdean theatre groups to share the festival stage with international artists. Because the festival privileges the participation of theatre groups from other Lusophone countries, such as Brazil, Portugal, Angola, and Mozambique, it is a crossroads for postcolonial Lusophone cultures from three continents. (10) Mindelact is held for ten days each September on Sao Vicente Island in Mindelo, Cape Verde's second-largest city, considered the country's cultural capital because of its vibrant music and arts scene. (11) Theatre festivals such as Mindelact demand that labor-intensive productions be mobile: as performers circulate local productions to the festival's global venue, their performances constantly pick up new significations and resonances. Dionisios's and Burbur's theatre productions demonstrate how improvised gestures and exclamations from performers and spectators alike complicate, nuance, and modify diaspora theatre that circulates.

Dionisios: Um suco natural

Urn suco natural represented an experiment for the Mindelact Festival. Rather than presenting it on the main stage in the Cultural Center in downtown Mindelo, Dionisios circulated this performance to three smaller towns outside the city's bounds--Lazaredo, Sao Pedro, and Calhau--on the Saturday afternoons of Mindelact's run in September. Sponsored by the Comite Municipal de Luta contra o HIV/SIDA (Mindelo AIDS Prevention Council), Um suco natural was Mindelact 2004's contribution to Cape Verde's "fight against HIV/AIDS." As such, it was advertised on colorful banners in downtown Mindelo and at public transportation stops, where vans wait to transport people from Mindelo to the rural townships.

Um suco natural features five men and women sitting in a Mindelo praca (town square), casually gossiping in Crioulo about passersby, who are invisible to the spectators. For example, one of the characters grows increasingly irate as the people she greets fail to return her born dia ("good morning"). The piece also includes moments of abstraction and fantasy: at one point, an actor scampers across the stage wearing all black, personifying a cockroach agitating the characters, while at another point the ensemble spontaneously erupts into a rousing jazz number (fig. 1). Um suco natural is both a social commentary on Mindelo's quotidian life and an intentional inversion of theatrical protocol: the actors are the ones sitting down and enjoying themselves by gazing out at the audience, rather than vice versa. (12) First performed in 2003, Um suco natural has become a staple of Dionisios's repertoire.

In August 2004, I attended Dionisios's rehearsals to witness how Urn suco natural evolved from the rehearsal room to the Mindelact stage. While waiting for a rehearsal to begin in the upstairs room of the Mindelo bar where Dionisios rehearses, I asked Elmidou Lopes, an actor and the group's organizer, how the play functioned as AIDS theatre. He explained that the message was subtle: at one point, one of the characters talks about a woman dressed in poorer attire who appears to be sick. Lopes explained that Dionisios preferred to hint at how AIDS affects Mindelo's poor community rather than present the kind of forthright, didactic AIDS theatre to which Cape Verdean audiences have grown accustomed. (13)

Soon Paulo Miranda, the group's artistic director, arrived. Miranda is a Cape Verdean artist who circulates frequently between Cape Verde, where he directs for Dionisios in the summers, and Guarda, Portugal, where he is completing a degree in arts management at the Instituto Politecnico da Guarda. He also writes some of Dionisios's plays, including Urn suco natural. Catching the end of my conversation with Lopes, Miranda interjected that since the AIDS Prevention Council was sponsoring the festival performances, they should modify the text to address AIDS more directly. Miranda suggested that they rehearse the play as usual but use improvisation to brainstorm ways to make the message of AIDS awareness explicit.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

When the actors arrived, they began rehearsing the play as scripted. At one point the characters discuss an offstage persona called Sr. Alfredo, who "has his theory that Cape Verde isn't Africa." (14) One character exclaims, "I'm tired of that conversation!" and then leaps to her feet and with fist raised, shouts, "Cape Verde is Africa!!! Viva Cabo Verde!!!" Sr. Alfredo was particularly intriguing to me, because he echoed a sentiment I heard often while living in Cape Verde as a Peace Corps volunteer from 1998 to 2000, when friends told me, "I'm not African, I'm Cape Verdean." The electrifying "Cape Verde is Africa!" moment directly refutes that popular discourse, theatrically aligning Cape Verde with the African continent. However, that moment was the first to go during this rehearsal. When the group ran the scene again, Lopes improvised and replaced the former exchange with "Sr. Alfredo has his theory that condoms don't serve any use" and then: "Yes they do! (15) Viva camisinhas, viva camisinhas!!" ("Viva condoms!"). Thus, the moment of diasporic desire for connection with an African homeland was deferred. The cast enthusiastically approved the change, reasoning that it was a way to get audience members on their feet chanting a new AIDS-prevention slogan.

Yet diasporic desire resurfaced later in the piece with a dreamlike sequence: one of the female characters rose from the bench and started to perform batuque, a women's dance featuring rapid hip gyrations that is widely considered to be "African" in origin. (16) The other characters accompanied her with tchabeta (rhythmic pounding on their thighs) (fig. 2). However, Miranda directed the actress, Minda Delgado, to infuse the batuque with ballet movements, deliberately creolizing Cape Verde's most "African" dance form. Miranda also mingled the percussionist beat of the actors' tchabeta with the mellifluous sound of Schubert's "Ave Maria" When asked about this choice, Miranda explained that he wanted to avoid creating the kind of "authentic" batuque performance that might be designated for tourists. Instead, he wanted to meld the "soul" of batuque with the "poetic" and "solitary" sentiment of Western classical music, thus making a hybridized dance move that was neither African nor Western but wholly Dionisios's own invention. (17)

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

The actors ultimately decided to close the piece by having one person stand up and pose as a TV announcer, reciting statistics from an AIDS-awareness commercial running frequently that summer on Cape Verde's television station, RTC (Radio e Televisao de Cabo Verde). Lopes played this role, announcing how many people in the world at large were infected by HIV/AIDS, how many were infected in Cape Verde, and how many in the country had died from the disease (fig. 3). After this, all but one of the other characters spring up and say they are going home to watch the novela (the Brazilian soap opera). The remaining actress, however, stays on the bench looking pensive. Miranda explained that this would model serious reflection on the AIDS crisis to the audience, which they anticipated would include primarily children of elementary school age.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

The improvisations I witnessed at the rehearsal became concretized in the performances of Um suco natural I attended in Lazaredo and Sao Pedro. The piece confounded one of my expectations significantly. I had assumed that the AIDS crisis might have drawn the Cape Verdean community into closer solidarity with other African countries. When I lived in Cape Verde from 1998 to 2000, AIDS was regarded as a disease of the African continent, something far removed from Cape Verde. When people died from AIDS in hospitals, their relatives often kept it under wraps. However, when I returned in 2004, AIDS-prevention billboards dominated the landscapes of Praia and Mindelo, Cape Verde's two major cities. The Comite de Coordenacao do Combate a SIDA-Cabo Verde (National Committee for AIDS Prevention) aired TV and radio spots incessantly. Every theatre group I met had an AIDS play in its repertoire, ready to be performed upon request from local schools or community groups.

Interestingly, this sharp increase in AIDS awareness does not correspond to a dramatic increase in HIV/AIDS prevalence. Although the prevalence rate has been rising since 1987, it is still comparatively low (in 2001 it was only .04 percent). According to a World Bank report on AIDS, Cape Verde is one of five sub-Saharan countries with "nascent epidemics" that "have a unique opportunity to intervene early and aggressively to pre-empt a full-scale epidemic." (18) Since 2002, that is exactly what the Cape Verdean government, with the help of various nongovernmental organizations, has been doing. That year saw the implementation of a five-year "national strategic plan against AIDS," with the visible effects that I have described, as well as new health curriculums in schools. (19)

Upon beginning my field work in 2004, I assumed that since AIDS prevention now figured prominently in everyday Cape Verdean life, AIDS could no longer be considered just a "disease of the African continent." (20) Alternatively, it might indicate that Cape Verde, after all, is part of Africa. How might the AIDS crisis affect the recognition and acceptance of Cape Verde's ties to Africa? Would Cape Verdean AIDS theatre reflect a new relationship to the mainland?

To my surprise, when Dionisios transformed Urn suco natural into an explicit AIDS-prevention piece, references to Africa were eliminated through improvisation. This first occurred with the "Viva condoms!" interjection. However, when I later saw the television commercial that Dionisios cited in their performance, I noted that Lopes left out one of the statistics in the ad: the number of people in Africa who are affected by AIDS. While the actual TV commercial charts a progression from the globe, to Africa, to Cape Verde, Dionisios's citation of it moves straight from the globe to Cape Verde, erasing the statistics on the African continent as a whole.

The way representations of Africa slip in and out of the performance reflects the ebb and flow of diasporic desire prevalent in Cape Verde. Miranda's melding of batuque with ballet is a case in point. Batuque is linked profoundly with Africa both in the popular imagination and intellectual discourse. (21) Joao Lopes Filho's overview of Cape Verdean writing on the dance form traces it to West African mandinga culture or, more generically, "African Bantus." (22) In Baltasar Lopes's novel Chiquinho, the title character and his fellow teenage friends join the revelry at one of Mindelo's raucous nightclubs during Carnaval. Suddenly, a badiu (someone from Santiago Island) initiates a batuque, and the narrative voice in the novel proclaims, "the room is in pure Africa, sun on the plain and a view of the savannah, with monkeys cavorting. The badi[u] takes everyone with him on a trip back through the centuries." (23)

The culture on Santiago is generally characterized as badiu, a Crioulo term that derives from the Portuguese radio ("vagrant" or "idler"). Historically, Portuguese settlers on Santiago applied the term to escaped slaves, who fled to the island's mountains in order to freely practice the religious and secular traditions passed down to them by their African ancestors. Today, badiu refers to the descendants of these escaped slaves, or more broadly, blacks living on Santiago. Batuque dancing is a salient marker of badiu culture. Its call-and-response song pattern, almost exclusive performance by women, and polyrhythmic percussionist beat renders batuque strikingly similar to mainland West African dance modes. (24)

Why would Dionisios, a theatre group from Mindelo, Sao Vicente Island, appropriate a dance form associated with Santiago, a local culture not specifically its own? During field work in 2004 and 2005 I witnessed four theatre groups incorporate batuque dancing into their Mindelact productions. Besides Dionisios, all of the other groups were from Santiago. Because Mindelo theatre groups often pride themselves on making theatre that reflects a more Western aesthetic, such as Shakespeare adaptations, Dionisios's use of batuque was an anomaly. (25) The batuque-ballet moment became a "syncretizing performance" an act signaling a dynamic appropriation of diverse performance modes classified variously as "European" and "African" within the Cape Verdean context. (26)

Um suco natural enacted a kinesthetic remembrance of Cape Verde's earlier phases of migration. Batuque dancing is considered a survival from the primary stage, when West Africans were forcibly removed to Santiago Island during the slave trade. (27) Sao Vicente Island, however, belongs to Cape Verde's secondary migration, when Portuguese traders further dispersed Santiago islanders to other islands in the archipelago. Thus, Dionisios's summoning of batuque dancing to a Mindelo stage is a theatrical illustration of the historical process by which Santiago cultural performances traveled to other islands on the bodies of slaves transported there, or those of former slaves relocating within the archipelago.

By charting a trajectory of historical movement from mainland Africa to Santiago Island to Sao Vicente Island, Urn suco natural echoes Manuel Duarte's assertion that Cape Verdean identity is intrinsically linked to an African identity. In his essay "Caboverdianidade e Africanidade" (first published in 1951), Duarte states: "We Cape Verdeans are ethnically and historically tied to Africa just as we are to Europe." (28) He maintains that acknowledging only the European half of Cape Verde's cultural inheritance in the face of an emerging pan-Africanist consciousness is "lamentable." (29) Since the intertwining of batuque dancing with ballet enacts these very sentiments, Urn suco natural frames Cape Verde's relationship to Africa in terms of the 1950s literary movement to locate Caboverdianidade within an all-encompassing "African" identity.

Miranda's political convictions affirm this. As I was helping Dionisios unload its truck after the Lazaredo performance, I asked Miranda if the transportable wooden stage belonged to the group. He responded that they had borrowed it from the local branch of the Partido Africano da Independencia de Cabo Verde (PAICV, African Party for the Independence of Cape Verde). He continued, "I'm all for PAICV! Independence!" (30) Suddenly, I had a newfound understanding of Miranda's theatre aesthetic. In Cape Verde the PAICV still bears the imprint of Amilcar Cabral, the leader of Cape Verde's liberation movement, who decried Cape Verdeans' rejection of their ties to Africa and encouraged them to regard their struggle for independence as part of a continent-wide anticolonial front.

The PAICV is the descendant of the Partido Africano da Independencia da Guine e Cabo Verde (PAIGC, African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde), which successfully waged an eleven-year struggle against Portuguese colonialism (1963-74). What distinguished the PAIGC from competing liberation movements in Cape Verde was its "re-Africanization" agenda. In an effort to disabuse the Cape Verdean bourgeoisie of the notion that they were "assimilated" Portuguese citizens, the PAIGC valorized elements of Cape Verde's popular culture that had been discouraged and devalued by the Portuguese colonial government for their "African" influences. (31) Significantly, batuque dancing falls under this category. (32) The PAIGC also sought to "weld" Cape Verde back onto the African continent through a political alliance with Guinea-Bissau. Although the union with Guinea-Bissau dissipated when the PAIGC became the PAICV in 1980, the new party retained its vision of Cape Verde as distinctly African.

As a PAICV enthusiast, Miranda disapproves of the way some Cape Verdeans dissociate themselves from their African heritage. He explained, "Cape Verde has this problem with identity: 'We're not black! We're Cape Verdean!' But Cape Verdean is not a race. Cape Verde is in Africa." (33) With these words, Miranda calls to mind Frantz Fanon's classic work on the racializing effect of colonialism, Black Skin, White Masks. According to Fanon, a reticence to identify with Africa is also prevalent in the Caribbean. (34) What makes Cape Verde a paradox is that cultural distancing coexists with geographic proximity. However, Miranda "unmasks" Cape Verde's ambivalent relationship to Africa as psychologically embedded in the complexity of "race" and what it means to self-identify as Crioulo, neither "black" nor "white." In Urn suco natural this ambivalence is manifest in the missing AIDS statistics on Africa, in "Viva condoms!" replacing a raised fist proclaiming African solidarity, and in batuque and tchabeta interlaced with ballet flourishes. Through theatrical improvisation, Dionisios's actors both erased and embraced ties to continental Africa, enacting diasporic ambivalence. Yet since they were literally standing on a PAICV "platform" they could never fully eradicate Africa from their performance.

Embodied performance is a powerful illustration of complex diasporic relationships. Brent Hayes Edwards associates diaspora with cultural and political linkages across communities that retain their differences and individuality. Drawing upon the image of a joint connecting two disparate body parts, Edwards likens the African diaspora to a body that can only move through a linkage of difference. (35) This compelling metaphor, which relies on the vocabulary of kinesthetic movement, can be productively applied to embodied theatrical performance. The disconnect between a gyrating hip and a pirouette articulates critical difference from both Africa and the West. Thus it performs Cape Verde's "in-between" Crioulo culture. However, fluid motion between batuque rhythms and a ballet pose also conveys the desire to move physically between two continents, suggestive of the circulatory stage of migration: decades of Cape Verdeans relocating from the islands to diaspora communities in the West. By shifting back and forth between Cape Verde and Portugal, Miranda himself engages in this circulation. The historical tug-of-war between two poles, Cape Verde's African "homeland" and Portugal, the former colonial metropole, became inscribed on Minda Delgado's dancing body.

Burbur: O intruso

In the summer of 2005, the Oporto municipal government sponsored a series of performances called "Quem Conta um Conto" ("who tells a story"). Groups representing immigrant communities from Brazil, Guinea-Bissau, the Ukraine, Mozambique, and Cape Verde dramatized storytelling traditions from their native lands in a variety of Oporto's restaurants, cafes, and bookstores. Apart from the Cape Verdean group, none of these immigrant associations ordinarily engage with theatre or literature, (36) so Oporto's municipal hall appointed a Portuguese director to assist them and put them in touch with local amateur actors. (37) Burbur, however, already had a complete theatre company. Because of the group's excellent theatrical reputation, O intruso drew crowds of almost two hundred spectators on each of the four nights it played. Burbur regarded the municipal government's invitation as a way to commemorate Cape Verde's thirtieth anniversary of independence (July zoos) in Oporto, an industrial city in the north of Portugal and the group's "home away from home."

The Burbur actors' theatrical training follows a path of circulation between Mindelo and Oporto set in motion by the theatre festival circuit. These actors--Odete Mosso, Silvia Lima, Flavio Hamilton, and Joao Paulo Brito--all grew up in Mindelo, where the latter three passed through the introductory acting class sponsored by the Centro Cultural Portugues (CCP, Portuguese Cultural Center). After that they joined the CCP's theatre group, which performed successful Crioulo-language productions of Western classics like Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost (O Fantasma de S. Filipe, 1996). The two actresses, Mosso and Lima, volunteered in an administrative capacity for the 1997 Mindelact International Theatre Festival, which opened up an opportunity for them to study theatre in Portugal. Mindelact 1997 was co-sponsored by Cena Lusofona, an association funded by Portugal's Ministries of Culture and Foreign Affairs that promotes Lusophone theatrical interchange. Cena Lusofona invited Mosso and Lima to participate in the Estagio Internacional de Actores Lusofonos (International Training of Lusophone Actors) in Lisbon and Coimbra from November 1997 to September 1998. After the acting internship, an instructor suggested that the actresses enroll at Oporto's Academia Contemporanea do Espectaculo (ACE, Contemporary Academy of Theatre) to complete a professional acting course. Later, Hamilton and Brito joined them at ACE. When all four graduated, they decided to remain in Oporto to begin their own theatre group.

Burbur (Crioulo for "fine soil") describes itself as a Cape Verdean theatre group in "terra-longe" ("far-away land"). Their fundamental objectives are to educate Oporto's Portuguese community about Cape Verdean culture and to remind the Cape Verdean community in Oporto about its roots in Cape Verdean oral and literary traditions. Thus, Burbur strives to facilitate the kind of host country/homeland relationship that is at the heart of many diasporic communities. Reasoning that knowledge of Cape Verdean culture is often limited to morna, the soulful music style made famous by internationally acclaimed singer Cesaria Evora, Burbur is devoted to popularizing classical works of Cape Verdean literature. Their debut production, As-Aguas (2002), was an adaptation of Baltasar Lopes's important 1930s novel Chiquinho. Burbur's theatrical enactments of sodade (nostalgic longing) for Cape Verde are tinged with the idea of Lusofonia. Another founding member of Burbur is Rui Duarte, a Portuguese artistic designer and filmmaker with a passion for Cape Verdean literature. An Angolan actor also studying at ACE, Adorado Mara, also later joined Burbur's ranks. According to Joao Paulo Brito, Burbur's original idea was to explore the nuances of Caboverdianidade, but the group broadened this objective to exploring a Lusophone "essence" when it was joined by non-Cape Verdean artists. (38)

With the summer 2005 production of O intruso, the emphasis on Lusofonia became explicit. The program note expressly stated that Burbur's goal is to define and promote Lusofonia and proudly included the theatrical debut of Mariano's classic work in that project. First published in 1957 and set in Mindelo, O intruso recounts the narrator's plaintive memories of the discord that pervaded his childhood home after he and his mother, grandmother, and siblings learned of his father's suicide on the neighboring island of Santo Antao one whole month after it occurred. As the narrator, Lela (short for "Manuel"), and his brother and sister, Leonel and Zulmira, mourn the loss of their father, their mother reacts to the family's now precarious financial situation by becoming involved with the arrogant Sr. Cruz, the intruder of the story's title. Lela's grandmother, fiercely reprimanding "Mamae" for behavior inappropriate for a recent widow, brings the story to its dramatic conclusion.

Significantly, Mariano also wrote a series of essays in the 1950s in which he contended that the Cape Verdean has a "Crioulo nature" that makes him or her particularly adaptable to changing circumstances, including the deterritorialization that accompanies living abroad. Because of poverty and periods of intense drought, emigration has long been a defining feature of the Cape Verdean reality. Throughout the nineteenth century, American whaling boats would regularly stop at the islands of Fogo and Brava to recruit Cape Verdean workers, who would accompany the ships to their New England destinations. These workers became the founders of the large-scale Cape Verdean immigrant communities in the Boston area. (39) By the middle half of the twentieth century, emigration to Portugal was also possible for those Cape Verdeans fortunate enough to graduate from Sao Vicente's prestigious secondary school and receive scholarships to Portugal's University of Coimbra. In his essays, Mariano defends the Cape Verdean concept of "hora de bai" ("time to go"), declaring that it is not escapism but a natural response to the insularity of life on the islands. However, departure is never complete: those who leave send money and household goods back and also long for physical return. Mariano even provides an example of "reterritorialization" in the host land: (40) an elderly man born on the Cape Verdean island of Sao Nicolan spent most of his life in Lisbon, but his home is an exact replica of houses on Sao Nicolau in terms of color, architectural style, and interior design. (41)

Burbur makes a similar move to "reterritorialize" Cape Verde in Oporto, which hosts a Cape Verdean community of approximately three thousand members. Like Mariano, actor Joao Brito attributes ease of adaptability to the Crioulo identity: "The Cape Verdean has a keen aptitude to adapt in different contexts. Cape Verde is constantly receiving new information: new ways of being and dressing, new music styles.... After three months, it won't be something that 'came from the United States or Portugal' because it will be transformed into something Cape Verdean." (42) From Mariano's perspective, a "knack" for assimilation is a historical product of Cape Verde's unique experience with Portuguese colonialism. Since the Portuguese presence was less pervasive here than in Brazil or mainland colonies like Angola, in Cape Verde, mestico sons of Portuguese landowners could take on leadership roles in the government or economic sectors. According to Mariano, this resulted in an acculturation process that was unusually egalitarian: Crioulos had the agency to decide which elements of Portugal's European culture to appropriate and which to reject. (43)

Interestingly, Burbur's first production, As-Aguas, framed the discussion of diaspora theatre in terms that echo Mariano's sanguine perspective on acculturation. In an article that accompanied Burbur's debut on the Mindelact stage, the group declared that they wanted to "achieve cultural miscegenation by combining their academic training acquired in Portugal with their African life experiences." (44) As-Aguas was indeed an intercultural project. Local Portuguese director Jose Carretas adapted Chiquinho for the stage and directed the production. However, because of its poignant exploration of the themes of island-dwelling and emigration, Chiquinho is considered quintessentially Cape Verdean: after growing up in a rural community on Sao Nicolau, a young man discovers a more cosmopolitan life when he moves to Mindelo for his secondary education, and ultimately, when drought strikes Cape Verde, he decides to follow in his father's footsteps and embark on the next boat for America. Burbur's production of As-Aguas made the rounds of Lusophone theatre festivals in 2002, playing at Oporto's Festival Internacional de Teatro de Expressao Iberica in June, Mozambique's Festival d'Agosto two months later, and Cape Verde's Mindelact Festival in September.

O intruso, however, frames diaspora specifically in terms of Lusofonia. Advocates of Lusofonia claim that because a common language and colonial inheritance link Portuguese speakers transnationally, any Portuguese speaker will feel at home in any other Lusophone country. As Joao Brito phrases it, when Burbur works with Brazilian or Angolan actors, "they begin to discover common areas, spaces, and even rhythms that evolved differently in different places but still share the same origin." (45) While this rhetoric problematically posits Portugal as the origin of a one-way cultural flow, with Portuguese travelers disseminating the seeds of Lusophone culture on three continents, it also suggests a way for Cape Verdeans to live both in the "homeland" and the "host country" when they venture to Portugal. Since Cape Verde is an integral part of Lusofonia, Cape Verdeans do not in theory have to shed their national identity when integrating into a larger "Lusophone" identity in Portugal. This poses a challenge to James Clifford's formulation of a "utopic/dystopic tension" in diaspora communities, wherein alienation and segregation in the host country is tempered by mythical memories of a homeland. (46) Lusofonia imagines that a utopian Lusophone community is always possible, whether or not the various speakers of Portuguese involved were born in Portugal. The metaphor of "utopia" (which literally means "no place") is particularly apt for this discourse, since Lusofonia suggests that the Lusophone identity exists betwixt and between the territorial boundaries of the seven Portuguese-speaking countries.

Of course, creating a transnational community along linguistic lines forged during the colonial era is not without its problems. In a review of the literature on Lusofonia, R. Timothy Sieber questions whether "it is possible to transform cultural and linguistic relations established in the imperial context into a more egalitarian cultural space for the present and future." (47) In particular, Lusophone scholars from outside Portugal have questioned the intentions of the Portuguese state in spearheading the Comunidade dos Paises de Lingua Portuguesa (CPLP, Community of Portuguese-Language Countries), which aims to further the social and economic development of Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal, and Sao Tome; to promote the Portuguese language; and to strengthen Lusophone solidarity in the face of a global economy dominated by English and French speakers. (48) Some scholars regard the CPLP as a way for Portugal to buttress its global influence and thus redress its peripheral economic position in Europe and, in particular, the European Union. (49) Passionate defenders of Lusofonia include Portuguese scholars and various Lusophone novelists, who embrace Lusofonia as a way to strengthen the fraternal bond among Portuguese speakers, heal the rifts of a colonial past, and make Portuguese a viable global language. (50)

In the midst of the geographic, linguistic, and cultural diversity in Brazil, Cape Verde, Portugal, and other Lusophone African countries, what exactly "holds" the Lusophone identity together? For Lusophone musicians, it may be the mournful tones, slow rhythms, and themes of longing and nostalgia that characterize both Portuguese fado and Cape Verdean morna music. (51) For the theatre artists of Burbur, it is a repertoire of culturally encoded common gestures or movements, yet it is not something explainable in words: when you see a "Lusophone" way of moving, you simply recognize it as such. (52) For the Portuguese state, it is Portuguese as a country's official language. Under the umbrella of Portugal's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Instituto Camoes sponsors Portuguese cultural centers in all Lusophone African countries. These centers sponsor cultural programs, such as theatre groups and literary endeavors that employ the Portuguese language, even while they affirm that their intent is not linguistic imperialism. (53) Yet as Sieber points out, Lusofonia is "more future possibility than achieved reality." (54) Indeed, power imbalances among artists from Portugal and Lusophone Africa remain. According to Dr. Francisco Fragoso (founder of Cape Verde's first post-independence theatre group, Korda Kaoberdi), as long as Africans encounter immense difficulty in receiving visas to enter Portugal, while the Portuguese can come and go freely in African countries, Lusofonia as egalitarian cultural exchange will be an ideal held just out of reach. (55) Does Burbur's theatrical enactment of Lusofonia hold out that utopic possibility?

I attended a performance of O intruso on July 20, 2005, when Burbur played at Oporto's lively Cafe Guarany, an upscale restaurant in the heart of the downtown district. Improvising with the sparse lighting effects and limited performance space that a restaurant setting affords, Burbur crafted an engaging theatrical contribution to Cape Verde's celebration of thirty years of independence, which Cape Verdean theatre groups back "home" in Praia and Mindelo were commemorating with their own productions. O intruso opened with the six actors--Odete Mosso, Flavio Hamilton, Adorado Mara, Djo Evora, Eli Monteiro, and Leo Evora--setting the stage for early-twentieth-century colonial Mindelo by dancing coladeira, a partner dance in rapid meter (fig. 4). (56) The men in various uniforms evoke the life of the Cape Verdean marinheiro (sailor) as he docked and embarked from Mindelo's then bustling port, Porto Grande (fig. 5). Yet as soon as the familiar Cape Verdean ambience of music and morabeza (a distinctly Crioulo hospitality and affability) is established, the sailors with their dancing girls disappear and only Hamilton and Mosso remain onstage. The performance occupies a space between theatre and storytelling: Hamilton and Mosso both narrate the entire story and act out all of Mariano's characters, deftly transgressing gender lines as necessary. First Hamilton is the beloved Papai who grudgingly compliments Mamae on her sewing, then Mosso becomes Leonel as a young Manuel (Hamilton) asks if he can still recognize their father in a photo, then Hamilton transforms a young child's playful steps into the crouched posture of Nha Filipa, the family's elderly neighbor. In the final moments, Mosso first plays Mamae, who has just rented the front room of the house to St. Cruz (to "save money on rent"), then plays the grandmother, who calls Mamae a "mulher de vida" ("woman of the night") after Mara dramatically drapes a long, black mourning veil over her, and then reverts back to Mamae, who cowers under the towering grandmother (Hamilton) while trying to defend her entanglement with Sr. Cruz (fig. 6).

[FIGURES 4 OMITTED]

These characters represent a microcosm of early-twentieth-century residents of Mindelo: they live a hand-to-mouth existence that finds relief only temporarily during communal music and dance festivities. As such, they are theatrical embodiments of Caboverdianidade in that particular time and space. This is reinforced by Burbur's unflinching fidelity to Mariano's text, a hallmark of mid-twentieth-century Cape Verdean literature. According to Duarte, every "comma" of the short story "O intruso" found its way into the script. (57) This textual rigidity is even manifest in the material presence of a book onstage. First, Mara brings the book to Hamilton, who reads from the opening paragraph while taking his sailor shirt off (fig. 7). Then, Mara remains onstage for a few minutes, silently reading the book to himself.

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

Such a meticulously scripted theatrical adaptation would seem to preclude spontaneous actor-spectator interaction. (58) However, the July 20 performance of O intruso was book-ended by moments of linguistic improvisation by performers and audience members that effected a splintering of the Lusophone subject by enacting linguistic diversity among Cape Verdeans, Angolans, and Portuguese. These moments proposed diverse models of utopia: Lusofonia as a harmonic social network among Lusophone subjects who nonetheless maintain their individuality and distinctive national identity, and Lusofonia as a reminder of the relations of dominance and subordination that existed among Portuguese and indigenous languages during the colonial era. (59)

The first improvisatory instance occurred when Djo Evora, a Cape Verdean actor, and Mara, an Angolan actor, ad-libbed a comical introduction to the piece, Evora warned everyone in the audience that if anyone's cell phone rang, he would punch them in the nose ("alguem ta leva um mom na fucim"). He spoke in rapid, idiomatic Cape Verdean Crioulo so that only Cape Verdean members of the audience would understand everything he said, although any Portuguese speaker would get the general sense because of the close proximity of the Crioulo vocabulary to standard Portuguese. However, this moment of private communication with other diaspora Cape Verdeans was soon interrupted. Mara asked in Portuguese what Evora meant by "mom na fucim" and Hamilton responded by joking with him in Crioulo. Figuring that two could play at that game, Mara began speaking Kimbundo and Umbundo, two of Angola's indigenous languages, which (unlike Crioulo) are not intelligible to Portuguese speakers. Consequently, only Angolan spectators in the audience could have understood. In response to the audience's obvious bewilderment, Hamilton retorted in Crioulo, "This Lusofonia thing: it's all very well and good, but still everyone gets confused." (60)

[FIGURES 6 OMITTED]

This Tower of Babel-like beginning signals the moments of connection and disconnect that arise when Lusophone artists from diverse geographic backgrounds encounter each other when circulating within the same transnational network (in this case, Hamilton's and Mara's determination to improve their theatre crafts brought them both to the former metropole to enroll in Oporto's acting academy). Interestingly, this polylinguistic moment illustrates Mariano's specific definition of culture: "heterogeneous elements felt internally like." (61) unity. Hamilton senses that Lusofonia constructs a kind of kinship between him and Mara, even though he does not understand a word of what Mara says. This frames Lusofonia as cultural interchange that recognizes culture as inherently heterogeneous. Thus, O intruso begins with an illustration of the complexity of Lusofonia, warning against a strict association of Lusofonia with conformity to the Portuguese language.

[FIGURES 7 OMITTED]

The utterances in Angolan languages also signal to the audience that despite the play's foundation in a Cape Verdean literary text, O intruso transcends the insularity of Caboverdianidade. Rather, the performance inserts a Cape Verdean national identity into a more encompassing Lusophone one. This paradigm shift epitomizes the kind of identity shifts that Cape Verdean subjects need to make when they integrate into diaspora spaces in Portugal. However, during each night of the performance, Evora was responsible for ending the free-floating improvisation by simply saying the Portuguese word "bern" ("all right" or "that's enough"). (62) This command ushered the actors into Mariano's text and consequently opened the threshold to a more distinctly Cape Verdean world. The irony, however, is that Mariano's text is written entirely in Portuguese, which serves as a reminder that the dominant language is necessary for facilitating communication within any Lusophone intercultural project.

Linguistic improvisation resurfaced in the break between acts, when the sailor characters reappeared and began dancing with the female characters again. During each separate performance of O intruso, the actors used this "time-out" to improvise in a mix of Crioulo and Portuguese about a topic that Duarte gave them just before the show began (for example, Duarte told me that for the next showing, he would have them talk about the glowing performance review that Dr. Francisco Fragoso wrote for the online newspaper VisaoNews in July 2005). This polyglot conversation punctured the otherwise all-Portuguese dialogue among the characters in the piece, exploding any myth of a monolithic Lusophone identity to which some advocates of Lusofonia may subscribe.

If the opening and interstitial moments of linguistic improvisation imagine a harmonious "unity among difference" the concluding moment took on a different tone. As the actors were filing off the small stage in the midst of the audience's applause, leaving the performance space by weaving through the restaurant tables, an older Portuguese gentleman in the audience called out, "E viva a lingua Portuguesa!" ("And long live the Portuguese language!"). (63) None of the other spectators responded verbally to his exclamation, but many responded kinesthetically with a fresh round of applause. Intrigued, after the performance I asked Hamilton if the surprise ending was in fact part of the show. He said that it was not, and that he did not know why the man responded in that way. Duarte later told me that he was surprised but touched that the man became so enthusiastic about the intent of their intercultural theatre that he spontaneously celebrated the essential aspect of Lusophone unity, the Portuguese language. (64)

Indeed, the performers' departure from the theatrical space seemed to inspire the spectator to take on the role of performer and improvise his own commentary on Lusofonia. Yet his spontaneous commendation of O intruso celebrated only Mariano's Portuguese-language text. Does the sentiment of "long live the Portuguese language" account for the actors' multilingual improvisations? As a spectator myself, I wondered if his interjection was out of sync with the utopic vision of Lusofonia that Burbur conjures with O intruso: that of a diaspora community held together by a common language yet, paradoxically, replete with linguistic diversity.

Director Rui Duarte aims to create theatre that explores that very paradox. To Duarte, an inherent connection among Lusophone people is not necessarily indebted to the Portuguese language. Rather, it encompasses common behavior, habits, and ways of thinking, all of which, he concedes, may be transmitted through language. Duarte maintains that Lusofonia must be severed from its assumed connection with the colonial process and redefined as the common points of contact that enable Lusophone artists to engage in fruitful collaborations. (65) Similarly, Jose Carretas, the Portuguese director who adapted and directed Burbur's first production, As-Aguas, relished the opportunity to work with Cape Verdean actors on transforming Lopes's primarily Portuguese-language novel into a bilingual production that melded Portuguese dialogue with Crioulo improvisation. Carretas even expressed envy of Cape Verdeans' ability to shift seamlessly between the two tongues: "If it's true that each word corresponds to an emotion, a sentiment, a desire, a doubt, a thing, a Cape Verdean is richer than us Portuguese, because he has more words." (66)

The actors and directors of Burbur imagine a utopia that fosters diversity, envisioning an egalitarian and horizontal model of citizenship within a transnational Lusophone world. (67) The Portuguese spectator's vision for Lusofonia is one in which the Portuguese language retains its dominance in the midst of languages such as Crioulo, Kimbundo, and Umbundo spoken elsewhere in the Lusophone world. Both interpretations of Lusofonia became available to spectators. The juxtaposition of these divergent linguistic improvisations perhaps suggests a harmonious Lusophone community, but one that contains the potential to go out of balance. The O intruso performance became a platform for competing visions of what holds together diaspora subjects from all corners of the Lusophone world and connects them to their common host country, Portugal.

Conclusion

It is perhaps illogical to draw final conclusions about a Cape Verdean conception of diaspora that is inherently "ambivalent." Ambivalence toward Africa as Cape Verde's "original" and distant homeland, as expressed in Dionisios's performance of Um suco natural, is perhaps what keeps performances relevant to Cape Verde's intensely creolized culture. The concept of "ambivalent diasporic desire" compels a rethinking of an easy dismissal of "roots" from discourses of diaspora. (68) While physically tracing the roots of a performance to a distant past on the African continent is both untenable and undesirable, attending to performers' perceptions of African roots is central to analyzing how historical and contemporary political discourses are espoused and reinforced through performance. Similarly, Burbur's performance of O intruso suggests that framing discussions of diaspora in terms of utopian possibilities--both in the sense of nostalgia for a home one has left behind and hope for a future connection with those one encounters in the "host country"--compels audiences and scholars to pay attention to how competing notions of transnational identities can become manifest in a single performance.

Both diaspora theatre and performers engage in continuous global circulation, especially when they move along the international theatre festival circuit. However, the most famous geographic framework for diaspora is the triangle that Paul Gilroy uses to describe the "Black Atlantic," or the global exchange of music, literature, and political perspectives that arose as a result of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century triangular trade among Africa, Europe, and the Americas. (69) Thinking about diaspora in terms of circulation transforms this framework from a triangle to a circle. Since a circle inherently resists a point of origin, as a paradigmatic model for diaspora it is more in line with contemporary diaspora theory that seeks to deemphasize common territorial origins. Kinesthetic movement onstage--a raised fist, a gyrating hip, a plie--potentially embeds both historical narratives of circulation and the desire to participate in a continuous "circulatory stage" of migration. Linguistic improvisation that enacts the diversity of the Lusophone world concedes that if a Lusophone identity exists, it thrives only when Lusophone peoples move within a transnational network and find moments of intersubjective understanding in diaspora communities that always remember multiple homelands.

Notes

(1.) See, e.g., William Safran, "Diasporas in Modern Society: Myths of Homeland and Return," Diaspora 1, no. 1 (1991): 83-99.

(2.) For a comprehensive discussion of how both doing and being have been considered key components of the diasporic identity, see Khachig Tololyan, "Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment," Diaspora 5, no. 1 (1996): 3-36.

(3.) Richard A. Lobban, Cape Verde: Crioulo Colony to Independent Nation (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 24-26.

(4.) Some scholars have even deemed Cape Verde part of the "New World." See Fernando Barbosa de Almeida, "Politica da lingual no Cabo Verde pos-coloniah Um desafio a construcao da 'lusofonia'" (M.A. thesis, Instituto Superior Ciencias do Trabalho e da Empresa, 2002), 12; Deirdre Meintel, Race, Culture, and Portuguese Colonialism in Cape Verde (Syracuse: Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, 1984), 26.

(5.) For an overview of the differences between assimilado (assimilated) and indigenato (indigenous) status, see Kesha Danielle Fikes, "Santiaguense Cape Verdean Women in Portugal" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2000), 16-20.

(6.) Manuel Duarte, Caboverdianidade e africanidade e outros textos (Praia, Cape Verde: Spleen Edicoes, 1999), 27. See also Gabriel Mariano, Cultura caboverdeana: Ensaios (Lisbon: Vega, 1991).

(7.) Methodologically, I am working from Andrea Klimt and Stephen Lubkemann's article "Argument across the Portuguese-Speaking World: A Discursive Approach to Diaspora" Diaspora la, no. 2 (2002): 145-62. The authors draw on Erring Goffman's notion of framing to define "diaspora" as an interpretive mode that describes how diasporic subjects imagine, construct, and represent themselves. Conceptually, I am working from James Clifford's suggestion that prevailing formulations of diaspora overlook the potential for an ambivalent attachment to homeland. Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 248-50.

(8.) Joseph Harris, introduction to Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, ed. Harris, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1993), 8-9.

(9.) Antonio Tavares, personal conversation, August 24, 2005.

(10.) Luis Mitras, "Staging Angola's Early History: Sequeira R. Luis Lopes or the Wondrous Mulatto by Jose Mena Abrantes (1993)," in African Theatre: Southern Africa, ed. David Kerr (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2004), 1-11. Mitras suggests that Lusophone performances on the Mindelact stage conjure up the memory of historical circulation among Europe, Africa, and Brazil. The performance venue, the Mindelo Cultural Center, is located at the mouth of Porto Grande, the port that became a pivotal coal-refueling point on trade routes connecting Europe to Africa, Asia, and South America in the mid- to late nineteenth century.

(11.) The festival receives sponsorship from Cape Verde's Ministry of Culture, municipal governments on various islands, Portuguese and French cultural centers in Cape Verde, and Cape Verde's private sector. Because numerous theatre groups on all of Cape Verde's nine inhabited islands have sprung up since the festival's inception, Mindelact is often credited for rejuvenating theatre in Cape Verde.

(12.) Mindelact 2004 festival program, 68.

(13.) Elmidou Lopes, interview by the author, August 26, 2004. For example, earlier in the summer I attended a play simply called SIDA (AIDS), about a young man who chooses to engage in promiscuous activity and in the end dies of AIDS. The final scene depicts his funeral, and one of his friends turns to the audience and begs them to "Stop SIDA" by using condoms or abstaining from sexual activity.

(14.) Paulo Miranda, "Um suco natural," unpublished play text. In Crioulo: "El tem ses teoria que Cab'Verde n'e Africa."

(15.) In Crioulo: "El tem ses teoria que camasinhas ka ta servi pa nada." "Ta servi, sim!"

(16.) Susan Margaret Hurley-Glowa, "Batuko and Funana: Musical Traditions of Santiago, Republic of Cape Verde" (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1997), 175.

(17.) Paulo Miranda, e-mail to author, March 27, 2006.

(18.) World Bank, "The Level and Distribution of HIV Infection in Developing Countries," http://www.worldbank.org/aids-econ/confront/confrontfull/chapter2/ chpzsub4.html (accessed November 1, 2005).

(19.) "National Strategic Plan against AIDS: 2002-2006," Secretariado Executivo, Comite de Coordenacao de Luta Contra a SIDA, Republica de Cabo Verde. Available online at www.worldbank.org (accessed November 2005).

(20.) In August 2005, I interviewed Clara Barros from Cape Verde's National Committee for AIDS Prevention. She agreed with my impression that AIDS is no longer regarded as an "African disease" in Cape Verde.

(21.) Hurley-Glowa, "Batuko and Funana," 175. From her ethnographic work on batuque, Hurley-Glowa recalls that during her ethnographic research on batuque many people told her, "So you want to learn about African music!"

(22.) Jogo Lopes Filho, Introducao a cultura cabo-verdiana (Praia, Cape Verde: Instituto Superior de Educacao, 2003), 261-7a. This section of Filho's book is a collection of excerpts on Cape Verdean music and dance. The excerpt from Filho's own earlier work, Cabo Verde: Apontamentos etnograficos, states that the cimboa, a distinctive West African stringed instrument that would accompany batuque dancing, at least in the nineteenth century, has its origins in the Mandinga ethnic group of West Africa. The excerpt from Jose Maria Semedo's and Maria Turano's Cabo Verde: O ciclo ritual das festividades da Tabanca explicitly links batuque dancing with the cimboa. The reference to Bantu culture is in an excerpt from Eutropio da Cruz's entry in Filho's edited Vozes da cultura cabo-verdiana.

(23.) Baltasar Lopes, Chiquinho (Mindelo, Cape Verde: Edicoes Calabedotche, 1997), 128. In Portuguese: "A sala esta em Africa pura, sol na achada e paisagem de savanna, com macacos cabriolando. O badio leva todo o mundo consigo na sua viagem de regresso de seculos." The English translation is from chapter 4 of Ellen W. Sapega's forthcoming book, Consensus and Debate in Salazar's Portugal (Penn State Univ. Press).

(24.) Lobban, Cape Verde, 75.

(25.) Mindelo is often described as more European than Santiago, since its international port made it a cosmopolitan hub in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See Ant6nio Leao de Aguiar Cardoso Correia e Silva, Nos Tempos do Porto Grande do Mindelo (Praia-Mindelo, Cape Verde: Centro Cultural Portugues, 2000); Joao M. Monteiro, "From Coal Depot to Cesaria's Home: Mindelo at the Crossroads of the World" in Urbanization and African Cultures, ed. Toyin Falola and Steven J. Salm (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 2005), 201-10.

(26.) I draw the concept of "syncretizing performance" from Loren Kruger, The Drama of South Africa: Plays, Pageants, and Publics since 1910 (New York: Routledge, 1999), 21-22.

(27.) In that sense, batuque dancing engages the Herskovits model of diaspora, which privileges African retentions. See Andrew Apter, "Herskovits' Heritage: Rethinking Syncretism in the African Diaspora" Diaspora a, no. 3 (1991): 235-60.

(28.) Duarte, Caboverdianidade e africanidade, 27.

(29.) Ibid., 23.

(30.) Paulo Miranda, personal conversation, September 4, 2004. In Crioulo: "Mi e tud PAICV! Independencia!"

(31.) Amilcar Cabral, "National Liberation and Culture" in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 58-65.

(32.) The PAICV government continued with the re-Africanization agenda during the 1980s by supporting research into batuque and recording batuque ensembles. See Lobban, Cape Verde, 76.

(33.) Miranda, personal conversation. In Crioulo: "Cabo Verde tem es problema ma identidade: 'No ka e preto! Nos e Caboverdiano!' Caboverdiano ka e um raca. Cabo Verde 'ta na Africa."

(34.) Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 25-26.

(35.) Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 11-16. For his joint metaphor, Edwards relies on Stuart Hall's concept of "articulation."

(36.) Most of them exist primarily for the purposes of political lobbying.

(37.) Rui Duarte, telephone interview, March 28, 2006.

(38.) Joao Paulo Brito, interview by the author, July 17, 2004.

(39.) Emigration took on a darker palette when the Portuguese colonial government forced Cape Verdean workers to migrate to labor plantations on Sao Tome during times of severe drought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. See Antonio Carreira, The People of the Cape Verde Islands: Exploitation and Emigration, trans. Christopher Fyfe (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1982).

(40.) For more on reterritorialization see Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

(41.) Mariano, Cultura caboverdeana, 65-81.

(42.) Brito interview. In Crioulo: "Caboverdiano ten tcheu capacidade pa adaptar em contexto diferente, e capacidade de assimila. Cabo Verde ta recebi constantamente um grande quantidade de informacao, maneri de estar, manera ki vesti, ki um tipo de musica.... e depois do tres meses jane e um coisa ki bern di Estados Unidos ki ben de Portugal. ki e um coisa ki foi transformado a Caboverdiano."

(43.) Mariano, Cultura caboverdeana, 39-63.

(44.) "BURBUR: Associacao cultural," Mindelact: Teatro em Revista 11 (July/December 2002): 30. In Portuguese: "atingir urea miscigenacao cultural pondo em confronto a formacao academico adquirido em Portugal com as vivencias e experiencias africanas."

(45.) Brito interview. In Crioulo: "Ja comeca ta descobri areas comuns, espacos comum, e ha ritmos ki no mesmo tempo evolviu diferente mas entretanto ki mesmo origem."

(46.) Clifford, Routes, 244-47.

(47.) R. Timothy Sieber, "Composing Lusophonia: Multiculturalism and National Identity in Lisbon's 1998 Musical Scene," Diaspora 11, no. 2 (2002): 165.

(48.) "Declaracao constitutiva da comunidade dos palses de lingua portuguesa," CPLP 1 (1996): 6-11. For an incisive critique of the CPLP from a Brazilian perspective see Omar Ribeiro Thomaz, "Tigres de papel: Gilberto Freyre, Portugal e os paises africanos de lingua oficial portuguesa," in Transitos coloniais: Dialogos criticos luso-brasileiros, ed. Clara Cabral (Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciencias Sociais, 2002), 39-63.

(49.) Sieber, "Composing Lusophonia," 168. For an interrogation of Lusofonia from a Portuguese perspective see Alfredo Margarido, A lusofonia e os lusofonos: Novos mitos portugueses (Lisbon: Edicoes Universitarias Lusofonas, 2000). For an analysis of how Lusofonia intersects with the politics of language in Cape Verde, see Almeida, "Politica da lingual no Cabo Verde pos-colonial."

(50.) For example, Fernando Santos Neves issues a biting retort to Margarido's critique of Lusofonia (see note 49) in Para urea critica da razao lusofona: Onze teses sobre a CPLP e a lusofonia (Lisbon: Edicoes Universitarias Lusofonas, 2000). For an argument about the pragmatics of Lusofonia and its potential advantages for the five Lusophone African countries, see Maria Jose Simoes de Brito Lopes, "A lusofonia e a politica da lingua e de cultura: A cooperacao com os paises africanos lusofonos" (M.A. thesis, Universidade Aberta, 1996). Lopes states that renowned Brazilian novelist Jorge Almada, long a proponent of the CPLP, says that the CPLP should not just be the responsibility of diplomats, but of writers who use the Portuguese language to re-create life.

(51.) Seiber, "Composing Lusophonia" 177.

(52.) Rui Duarte, interview by the author, July 17, 2004.

(53.) Seiber, "Composing Lusophonia," 165. During a personal interview on August 20, 2004, Ana Cordeira, director of the Portuguese Cultural Center in Mindelo, told me that the center encourages the use of the Portuguese language but does not try to impose it on the theatre groups it sponsors.

(54.) Seiber, "Composing Lusophonia" 165.

(55.) Francisco Fragoso, interview by the author, July 19, 2005.

(56.) Lobban, Cape Verde, 76-77.

(57.) Rui Duarte, interview by the author, July 21, 2005.

(58.) Jill Dolan locates this kind of dialogic actor-spectator interaction, or "intersubjectivity" at the heart of what she calls "utopian performatives," or fleeting moments in performance when artists who experience social and political marginalization in "real" life imaginatively construct citizenship rights as truly democratic and horizontal. Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).

(59.) For example, in Cape Verde, the Crioulo language was widely discouraged under Portuguese colonialism. It was forbidden to speak Crioulo at schools, government buildings, public affairs, or even on the radio. See Meintel, Race, Culture, and Portuguese Colonialism, 141.

(60.) In Crioulo: "Storia de Lusofonia: e muito bonit, ma e so pa confundi gente."

(61.) Mariano, Cultura caboverdeana, 47.

(62.) Rui Duarte, telephone interview, March 28, 2006.

(63.) Dolan indicates that moments when performers leave the area marked off for performing and mingle with the audience, perhaps speaking with them conversationally or placing a casual hand on their shoulders, are ripe with utopian possibilities. See Dolan, Utopia in Performance, 54.

(64.) Rui Duarte, e-mail to author, April 17, 2006.

(65.) Rui Duarte, telephone interview, March 28, 2006.

(66.) "BURBUR: Associacao cultural," 30. In Portuguese: "Se e verdade que cada palavra corresponde a uma emocao, um sentimento, um desejo, uma duvida, uma coisa, um caboverdiano e mais rico do que nos portugueses, porque tem mais palavras."

(67.) For the connection between utopia and citizenship see Dolan, Utopia in Performance, 107.

(68.) The trend to move diaspora discussions away from a fixation with common territorial origins is evident in Paul Gilroy's seminal work, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), and Brent Hayes Edwards's critique of Gilroy in "The Uses of Diaspora," Social Text 19, no. 1 (2001): 45-73. See also Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg, eds., Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), and Tiffany Ruby Patterson and Robin D. G. Kelley, "Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World" African Studies Review 43, no. a (2000): 47-68, as well as the various responses to Patterson and Kelley in that issue.

(69.) See Gilroy, The Black Atlantic. I ground my analysis here in Brent Hayes Edwards's critique of Gilroy. In "The Uses of Diaspora," Edwards claims that it is the Black Atlantic's "fascination with the Atlantic frame, and its focus on the triangular slave trade in particular, that continually draws Gilroy back into the quagmire of origins" (63).