Mimesis and the Historical Imagination: (Re)Staging History in Cape Verde, West Africa

McMahon, Christina S.

doi:10.1017/s0307883307003379

Cited by 3 publications

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“…As an alternative to the fixed explanations of formal heritage, Crang (1994Crang ( , 1996 examined popular expressions of social memory by looking at the ways in which individuals and groups engage and articulate their senses of heritage through everyday artifacts and ephemeral materials such as photographs and postcards. A closer example to the African postcolonial context in which this article develops is McMahon's (2008) work on the performative role of memory. McMahon engages with theatre plays in Cape Verde, suggesting that when the actors' imaginatively use the past, by changing representations of race, colonial authority and historical subjects' agency, they can have lasting repercussions on the way a nation remembers its past.…”

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confidence: 99%

A sweet and amnesic present: the postcolonial landscape and memory makings in Cape Verde

Sarmento

2009

Social & Cultural Geography

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The construction of memory in landscapes is a complex process which is embedded in webs of political and economic power. Often history is twisted and bended to better serve the current interests of the hegemonic forces at play. In this paper I attempt to explore how memory is at work in three different sites in Santiago Island, Cape Verde: an old fort and a historical town; a concentration camp; and a global resort. The three sites participate in the erasure, maintenance and creation of memory in different ways, forging new forms of collective identity, which are embedded in local as well as global forces and processes. Through an analysis of the changes taking place on these sites, this paper suggests that while the country lives on foreign aid and attempts to embrace neo-liberal practices, it fails not only to provide basic services to the population but to engage critically with its history and geography.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A sweet and amnesic present: the postcolonial landscape and memory makings in Cape Verde

Sarmento

2009

Social & Cultural Geography

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Spacing Forgetting: The Birth of the Museum at Fort Jesus, Mombasa, and the Legacies of the Colonization of Memory in Kenya

Linehan

Sarmento

2011

Cultural Memories

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As the cornerstone of colonial expansion into East Africa, and, consequently, as one of the most important public buildings on the continent, Fort Jesus in Mombasa, Kenya, presents many opportunities to investigate the intersection of colonialism, memory, and power. The fort was built in 1594 by the Portuguese to help secure their foothold in East Africa and to provision and protect their expansive trading network in the Indian Ocean. With its caramel-colored rampart of hewn coral looming over the old-town district (Fig. 1) and its modern role as a hub of cultural activity and tourism in the city, the fort is listed by UNESCO as a potential world heritage site. It has a violent past and is shaped by multiple layers of history and memory. Over time it fell under and out of Portuguese control and operated for 300 years as the command center of the Omani Sultanate and, later, the Sultan of Zanzibar (Hinaway, 1970). It also functioned as a prison under the British from the late nineteenth century until a period in the 1950s that paralleled the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya, at which time the fort was converted into a museum. This conversion was funded with the assistance of the Portuguese government, which grasped the opportunity to restore the fort as part of that country's public commemoration of Prince Henry the Navigator, a paramount figure in Portuguese national and imperial identity. This chapter focuses on the transformation of the fort from a prison into a museum, a remarkable moment of colonial authority and anticolonial struggle that involved key figures of the Kenyan anticolonial movement, notably the trade unionist and nationalist politician Tom Mboya, and the leader of the East African Goan League, journalist Pio Gama Pinto.

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From Adaptation to Transformation: Shakespeare Creolized on Cape Verde's Festival Stage

McMahon¹

2009

Theat Surv

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This is a tale of two directors. The setting is the Republic of Cape Verde, a former Portuguese colony and a tiny archipelago nestled off the coast of Senegal in West Africa. Framing the story is Cape Verde's annual Mindelact International Theatre Festival, which since 1997 has invited Lusophone theatre artists from three continents to perform a wide array of theatre genres on a mainstage program alongside Cape Verdean troupes. João Branco, a Portuguese director who moved to the islands in the early 1990s, is the artistic director of both the Mindelact Festival and the veteran Cape Verdean theatre troupe GTCCPM (Grupo de Teatro do Centro Cultural Português do Mindelo/Theatre Group of the Mindelo Portuguese Cultural Center). For Mindelact 2003, GTCCPM performed an abridged version of King Lear rendered in Cape Verdean Crioulo, a mix of Portuguese and several West African languages. Beyond bolstering Branco's cherished goal of creolizing Shakespeare's plays by transporting them to Cape Verde's Afro-European cultural milieu, Rei Lear worked in concert with the festival's media blitz to extol local spectators in Mindelact's host city, Mindelo, for their good taste. Two years later, Herlandson Duarte, a young Cape Verdean director and Branco's former theatre student, staged a Crioulo-language Midsummer Night's Dream at Mindelact with his new theatre company, Solaris. Duarte's production transformed Bottom's play-within-a-play into a searing critique of Mindelense audiences and the structures of authority that prop up the festival itself.

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Mimesis and the Historical Imagination: (Re)Staging History in Cape Verde, West Africa

Cited by 3 publications

References 11 publications

A sweet and amnesic present: the postcolonial landscape and memory makings in Cape Verde

A sweet and amnesic present: the postcolonial landscape and memory makings in Cape Verde

Spacing Forgetting: The Birth of the Museum at Fort Jesus, Mombasa, and the Legacies of the Colonization of Memory in Kenya

From Adaptation to Transformation: Shakespeare Creolized on Cape Verde's Festival Stage

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