The late Cesária Évora, celebrated ‘barefoot diva’ of the Cape Verde Islands, shone a global spotlight on the small island republic located approximately 600 km off the West African coast. The intercultural fusings of the music and her vocal style represent aspects of the Crioulo culture of this former Portuguese colony, a country that has been under-researched in African studies and certainly in theatre studies. Of all the performance traditions, it is music that is most celebrated throughout the Cape Verdean diaspora as a marker of national and cultural identity. The Grammy Award-winning Évora, notably lauded in her New York Times obituary, was often referred to as a cultural ambassador, introducing Cape Verde and its Crioulo culture to an international stage.

The Cape Verde Islands provide a rich opportunity, which only in the last few years scholars have taken up, to examine theatre at the crossroads of Africa, Europe, and the Americas, with a particular focus on how Cape Verdeans negotiate national and international identities in and through performance. Theatre in the islands reflects interplay along a Crioulo spectrum with Europe on one end and Africa on the other. The post-independence theatre movement in Cape Verde and the theatrical tensions manifested on and off stage continually raise questions of what it means to be Crioulo – racially, culturally, nationally, and internationally.