1 Introduction – Global Casting Calls
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Notes 1 Introduction – Global Casting Calls 1. David Harvey (2005) defines the neoliberal state as one that creates the conditions for widespread accumulation of capital from both foreign and domestic sources. Therefore, the government’s role is to work with industries to strengthen the overall market, usually by allowing businesses and mul- tinational corporations to operate with minimal government interference. Yet, as Harvey points out, seemingly sanguine discourses of ‘freedom’ (as in ‘free enterprise’) merely serve to consolidate class power, since elites in advanced capitalist countries such as the United States are primarily the ones who benefit from the surpluses generated from free market trade. 2. See Chapter 6 for a discussion of the now- uncertain future of the FESTLIP festival. In a curious turn of events, FESTLIP 2012 was canceled for lack of funding. It did come back in 2013, taking place in August of that year. 3. For example, Lim (2005) analyzes an urban gay theatre production to show how Singapore’s queer community unsettles both a growing market for imported Western gay culture and state policing of sexual minorities. In another example, Graham- Jones (2005) cites Underiner’s (2004) work on Mayan theatre troupes to show how the local and global are inextricably intertwined, since these troupes rely on international media to circulate their indigenous theatre. 4. This is an example of the recent claim by some globalization theorists that mechanisms of circulation are constitutive of cultural practices, not merely incidental to them (Gaonkar and Povinelli 2003; Lee and LiPuma 2002; Werry 2005). 5. Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (1983) in particular has been the subject of much scholarly critique. To be fair, Gellner’s theory of nationalism, which draws from case studies in industrial Europe, does not explicitly say that nationalism requires actual homogeneity among a country’s political, demographic, and cultural units. Instead, he writes that nationalists feel that such congruency exists, no matter how illusory or misguided that may be. Nationhood is, for Gellner, a willed collectivity based on a perception of a culture that is shared. Nevertheless, scholars have taken Gellner to task for his assumption that ‘congruency,’ or at least the desire for it, is the basic political principle underlying nationalism. For example, Askew (2002) notes that postcolonial nations such as Kenya and Tanzania house numerous ethnic groups brought together forcibly by European colonialists. These eth- nic groups experience a sense of ‘shared culture’ primarily with each other rather than their countries as a whole (9). Homi Bhabha (1994) takes issue with Benedict Anderson’s notion of nations as ‘imagined communities,’ since critical exclusions will always result when people imagine their country to be populated by others just like themselves. Bhabha suggests that 183 184 Notes new narratives of nationhood will be developed from a country’s margins by those threatened with exclusion from hegemonic and official discourses, such as migrants, diasporans, and postcolonial subjects. For further critiques of homogeneity and nationhood, see Edensor (2002); for a diasporic perspec- tive, see Axel (2001) and Tololyan (1991). 6. See Dulce Almada Duarte’s (2003) comprehensive discussion of the genesis of Cape Verdean Crioulo. 7. Semedo and Turano (1997) cite several colonial documents prohibiting Tabanca, dating primarily from the years 1895 through 1923. 8. For more on how certain islands in Cape Verde have been associated with Africa and others with Europe, see Fikes (2006) and Anjos (2002). 9. The journal African Theatre’s recent special issue on festivals (vol. 11, 2012) also attests to this claim. 10. While Adorno’s first major theoretical formulation of the ‘culture industry’ appeared in Dialectic of Enlightenment, co- authored with Max Horkheimer in 1947, he continued to hone this thesis throughout his life. See Huyssen (1975). 11. The long- awaited third edition of a Black Arts festival (Arts Nègres) took place in Dakar, Senegal, in December 2010. 12. See also the special issue on Africa of the journal The Global South (vol. 2, no. 2 [2008]), especially the introductory essay (Alabi 2008). 13. The festival in Cameroon is called Rencontres Théâtrales Internationales du Cameroun (RETIC); the two festivals in Burkina Faso are called Festival International de Théâtre pour le Développement (FITD) and Festival International de Théâtre et de Marionnettes de Ouagadougou (FITMO). 14. Earlier scholarship on globalization focused primarily on its economic impact. Saskia Sassen’s (1998, 2002) work has been prominent in this regard. In many ways, Appadurai’s ground- breaking book, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996), was pioneering in its holistic attempt to theorize cultural globalization. Lee and LiPuma’s work, however, is evidence of a newer strand of globalization theory that seeks to analyze finance and cultural practices jointly. Many of these new dialogues have appeared in the journal Public Culture. 15. Other Portuguese scholars defend the notion of lusofonia and its advantages for Portuguese- speaking countries. For example, Fernando Santos Neves (2000) offers an incisive retort to Margarido’s (2000) critique of lusofonia. 16. For an excellent overview of scholars who perceive lusofonia as a reawaken- ing of lusotropicalism, see Sieber (2002). 17. From page three of a sponsored section called ‘Small Island Nation Attracts Big Global Partners’ in the July– August 2011 edition of Foreign Affairs. Thanks to Jennifer Granger for pointing this out to me. 18. See, for example, Lusografias (Cezerilo 2002), proceedings from an inter- national conference on Lusophone writing held in Maputo, Mozambique, 18– 22 February 2002. Some authors, such as Mozambique’s Mia Couto, are more ambivalent toward the lusofonia project. See Couto (2008). 19. The closing ceremony took place on 12 July 2009, at FESTLIP’s hub in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro. Festival artistic director Tânia Pires generously allowed me to attend this private affair and audio record its events. Notes 185 20. While Appadurai (1996) invokes Benedict Anderson’s generative notion of nations as imagined communities conjured through processes of print capitalism, he specifies that today’s communities of sentiment do not rely on the printed word. 21. Some examples are António Augusto Barros, artistic director of Cena Lusófona in 2005, and Ana Cordeiro, director of the Instituto Camões in Mindelo in 2005. Mozambican actors Evaristo Abreu and Isabel Jorge told me of the frustration they experienced while attending international confer- ences where simultaneous translation is provided for a multitude of romance languages but not Portuguese. They expressed a hope that Lusophone festivals will advocate for the importance of Portuguese as a global language. 22. Francisco Fragoso, founder of the post- independence theatre group Korda Kaoberdi of Cape Verde, emphasized to me the reality of Africans’ unequal access to visas and international travel within the supposedly egalitarian community of the CPLP. Interview with the author, Lisbon, Portugal, 19 July 2005. 23. In the immediate post- independence era, increasingly autocratic govern- ments exhibited such hostility toward the arts that performers were put on the defensive, as is cogently expressed in Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiongo’s (1998) account of making grassroots theatre in Kenya in the 1970s. 24. See Magliocco’s (1993) discussion of the heated local politics surrounding two cultural festivals centered on the Madonna in Sardinia. Departing from the Durkheimian assumption that community festivals convey group iden- tity, Magliocco examines how festivals can instead be points from which conflict emerges. 25. OTACA is an acronym for Oficina de Teatro e Comunicação de Assomada (The Assomada Theatre and Communication Collective). 26. Castañeda (2006) distinguishes this from ‘doing fieldwork,’ or the kind of data gathering with samples, surveys, and questionnaires that does not require long- term immersion (76). 27. I owe a great debt to João Branco (2004), who painstakingly collected the newspaper articles and ephemera housed in CEDIT when he was working on his book Nação teatro: História do teatro em Cabo Verde. 2 Mapping Festivals 1. ‘Fladu fla’ is a common expression in badiu, the Santiago Island variant of Cape Verdean Crioulo. The phrase refers loosely to gossip or hearsay; it liter- ally means ‘they’re all saying’ or ‘word has it.’ 2. There are various ways to spell ‘Crioulo.’ Fladu Fla’s title reflects how it would be written using the Santiago variant, badiu. 3. For a thorough review of Africanist critiques of lusotropicalism, see Arenas (2011: 8– 11). 4. However, in Managing African Portugal (2009), Kesha Fikes makes the convincing argument that Freyrian notions about the absence of racism in Portugal were fundamentally challenged when an influx of African immigrants arrived in Lisbon in the 1970s after countries such as Cape 186 Notes Verde and Angola achieved independence. The abrupt shift in Lisbon’s demographic provoked violent incidents of racial hatred. 5. Even Portuguese scholars occasionally reproduce these views, as evidenced by political scientist Paulo Gorjão’s recent assertion that Portugal’s campaign for a non- permanent seat on the UN Security Council for 2011/12 was successful because of ‘[t]he country’s roughly one thousand years of history, its global presence, [and] behavior and consideration