Black Voices in Early Modern Spanish Literature 1500–1750

This book recovers key chapters in the history of Afro-Iberian diasporas by exploring the literary contributions and life experiences of black African communities and individuals in early modern Spain. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, international trade involving chattel slavery led to significant populations of enslaved, free(d), and half-manumitted black African women, men, and children in the Iberian Peninsula, and these demographic changes subsequently transformed Spain’s urban and social landscapes. 

In exploring Spain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade and the effects on cultural forms of the period, this book examines a broad range of texts, providing new readings as well as unearthing new documents relating to black African poets, performers, and black confraternities. This research attests to the broad yet largely disregarded literary and artistic impact of the African diaspora in early modern Spain, expanding the scope of linguistic practices beyond habla de negros and creating space for, among other things, early modern black poets in the Spanish literary canon. 

Black Voices challenges established understandings of black Africans and black African history in early modern Spain. It argues that black Africans exerted significant cultural agency by collectively contributing to and shaping the literary texts of the period, including those of the popular genre villancicos de negros, and by developing artistic traditions and exercising creativity as musicians, dancers, and poets. As both creators and consumers of cultural forms, black African men and women navigated a restrictive, coercive slave society yet negotiated their own physical and cultural spaces. Bridging the history of Spanish literature and black African diasporic studies, Black Voices establishes new research and promotes lively scholarly debate in an area that clearly merits academic study.  

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Note on Translations
Introduction
1. Revisiting Histories, Rethinking Spaces
2. Beyond the Eye of the Beholder: Black Africans in Early Modern Spanish Literary Texts
3. Performing Blackness: Villancicos de Negros and Other Religious Spectacles
4. Spaces of Cultural Negotiation in Early Modern Spain: Music and Dance in the Street, in Courts, and on Board Ships
5. The Intangible Poetic Legacy of Black Voices
Conclusions
Appendix A: A List of Early Modern Spanish Literary Texts with Black Characters
Appendix B: A Catalogue of Black Stereotypes in Seventeenth-Century Villancicos de Negros Performed in Spain
Appendix C: Fourteen New Villancicos de Negros
Appendix D: Jácara de sucesos about Francisco de Meneses (1687)
Bibliography
Index