After many years living and working in São Paulo, Brazil, I embarked on an exploratory fieldwork trip to Lisbon in 2003. What immediately caught my attention was Cabo Verde Creole (Kriolu) and, in particular, the performative aspects of the language. In 2009 and 2011, I conducted anthropological fieldwork in the archipelago capital city of Praia to contextualize the linguistic politics I encountered in Lisbon among Kriolu rappers. Dr. Amado begins his book with an anecdote regarding the language debates of 2009–10 and I immediately conjured the memory of sitting above the legislative forum with representatives arguing back and forth using Portuguese and Kriolu. I was fascinated less with the content of the debate but rather the choice of register, as I pondered the potential politics involved in speaking one or the other language.
This book addresses such queries by unpacking and critically analyzing the “language-politics nexus” in Cabo Verde as a method to assess the quality of democracy on the archipelago. Amado argues that despite positive conventional indicators of growth defining Cabo Verde as a healthy democracy, the Cabo Verdean state is steadfastly “illegible” to the majority with political participation remarkably low. The current diglossic language policy reinforces sociopolitical inequalities through exclusionary practices and linguistic hierarchy. Amado states clearly, “the phenomenon of state illegibility is directly related to the postcolonial language policy” (119).
The text features clear writing and a transparent structure, which provide access into the author’s logic and argumentation. Concepts and keywords are defined in an operational manner (e.g., diaspora, diglossia, illegible state, social remittances, institutional linguicism, etc.). I think this book would serve any undergraduate course on the politics of language or postcolonial studies quite well. Personally, as someone who has worked with similar archival material and comparable socio-linguistic issues, I found this text fresh, vibrant, and provocative.
Methodologically, Amado relies on archival research, comprised of mostly official state newspapers, such as Boletim Oficial, and parliamentary archives. Such an approach contributes to a top-down approach in the first half of the text and aligns with Amado’s general approach of political science. In addition, Amado conducted focus group interviews in order to balance state structure and discourse with popular linguistic practices and political engagement. His analysis in Chapters Six and Seven features explanatory theories of mockery (“politics of ridicule” and “lusophone privilege”), which show how linguistic hierarchies function in public life, and theories of linguistic cooptation, which demonstrate how politicians appropriate popular Kriolu sayings, what Amado calls “youth sociolect,” to connect with lower class communities (see, for example, the discussion of Bourdieu’s concept of “strategy of condescension” [140]). As a sociocultural anthropologist, I found the empirical material helpful in providing a more balanced approach but somewhat thin and underdeveloped. Including the work of, for example, Cabo Verdean urban sociologist Redy Wilson and/or my own work with Kriolu rappers would offer a more nuanced picture of linguistic practices. In addition, more thorough analysis of online discourse (mentioned briefly on pp. 163–64) could strengthen Amado’s conceptualization of the “linguistic landscape.” With that said, Amado’s observations on the various uses of English, given the strong diasporic connections to the northeast of the United States and the consequential political influences of such diasporic communities, are insightful (see Chapter Four and pp. 173–74).
One of the strengths of the book is its distributed attention to temporal and spatial context. Amado cogently details the linguistic politics of Kriolu at regional, national, and transatlantic levels. His attention to historical processes is important as he shows how a “minor” language, that of the colonizer—that is, Portuguese—became the dominant language of Cabo Verde (i.e., glottophagy). To this end, his historization of the language debate, including such figures as Eugénio Tavares and Baltasar Lopes da Silva, is helpful.
Spatially, Amado makes the crucial point that international linguistic politics influence domestic language policies, as actors worry about relevance if local languages are upheld as national (see Chapter Three). In this vein, Amado notes that the emergence of organizations, such as the CPLP (Community of Portuguese Language Countries) in the 1990s, spearheaded by a “soft” power contestation between Portugal and Brazil, have had a significant impact on Cabo Verdean language policies. Jerry Dávila’s scholarship concerning the linguistic-cultural diplomacy of Brazil in postindependence Lusophone countries might enrich the analysis in these sections.
This contextualization leads to one of the pivotal arguments of the text, namely that while revolutionary anti-colonial leaders during the 1960s and 70s—for example, those of the PAIGC (African Party of the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde)—were radical in terms of institutional governance, they were conservative in their approach to language maintaining the preference, later to be codified, for Portuguese (119). Despite initiatives of c/kriolu writing systems (i.e., ALUPEC and AK), literature published in Kriolu, and forays into bilingual education (99–110), the linguistic hegemony of Portuguese remains formidable. Amado demonstrates through his interpretations of these initiatives among other discursive material that “wars of orthography” (46) and tensions over “language as a right” and “language as a duty” (51) continue to fragment the archipelago nation-state and reinforce differential access to political power.
