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

Abstract

This article examines what is at stake when performers and playwright critically transfigure oral histories when staging them theatrically. Representations of race and colonial history are integral to a nation's conception of its own cultural identity. These issues are at the forefront of many theatre productions in Cape Verde, an intensely creolized West African nation whose islands bear traces of the Europeans and Africans who have commingled there for centuries. The article examines two performances rooted in Cape Verdean history that challenge existing theoretical paradigms for the mimetic relationship between actors and the historical personae they portray onstage. Proposing the concept of the ‘historical imagination’, it explores how theatre artists self-consciously alter the local history they circulate to an international theatre festival stage and, concomitantly, how the theatre festival context and media coverage profoundly impact how national history is told within a global performance arena.