Black/Early/Iberia
By Nicholas Jones | Published on September 2, 2020
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My research agenda explores the agency, subjectivity, and performance of Black diasporic identities in early modern Iberia (Portugal, Spain, and Valencia) and the Ibero-Atlantic world. Another way to put it: my work leaves a blueprint for past rebellion by black Africans and their descendants in the pre-Enlightenment Iberian world. As a scholar whose work remains firmly rooted in both Africana Studies and early modern Iberian Studies, I enlist the strategies, methodologies, and insights of Black Studies into the service of Early Modern Studies and vice versa. I re-imagine the lives of early African diasporic people via the global circulation of material goods, visual culture, and ideological valences represented in archival documents and literature from West-Central Africa, Iberia, and the Americas. And to that effect, my body of work pushes back on the misconception that the enslavement and subordination of black Africans in the early modern Iberian world stripped them of all their culture and heritage. To achieve and to illustrate this conviction, I not only center early diasporic African lives—enslaved and free—, but also excavate and tell their stories that have been buried, misunderstood, or otherwise discarded as insignificant to literary canons and historical narratives. What motivates my research and sustains my love for solving the mysteries surrounding the contradictorily complex Black lives in pre-Enlightenment Iberia manifests in the methodology of close reading, the analysis of material and visual cultures, and the arguing for the primacy of politics— customary, intellectual, and juridical—in mediating the earliest contacts between sub-Saharan Africans and Europeans.
What I describe here has transpired in the momentum and trajectory of my publication record on these topics. Moving forward, I am presently completing two new books: my second monograph titled Cervantine Blackness and a co-edited volume with Chad Leahy, published by Routledge, Pornographic Sensibilities: Imagining Sex and the Visceral in Premodern and Early Modern Spanish Cultural Production. Looking ahead to 2022, I have also been invited to serve as guest editor where I will curate special issues in the journals La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Languages, Literatures & Cultures (“Black Timescapes: Tapestries of Africa in Premodern Iberia”) and Bulletin of the Comediantes (“Black Performance in Early Modern Iberia).
I am a teacher-scholar-activist whose model of academic engagement manifests via antiracist teaching practices, thereby positioning me to serve as a teacher-scholar-participant in Bucknell University’s broader community. In the coming pages, I will convey my dedication to this model of academic engagement both inside and outside the classroom. While teaching the canon of early modern Spanish literary and cultural studies, my courses maintain rigor with forward thinking approaches to the scholarly traditions of my field. The methodological frameworks of my classes center the strategies of close reading, critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, material and visual analyses, as well as performance studies. In my upper-level seminar “Black Iberia”—formerly titled “The Hispanic Black Atlantic: Then and Now”—I instill in my students the importance of social justice, global awareness, and interdisciplinary approaches to the Humanities. On the first day of class, I candidly tell my students one of the seminar’s primary goals: to be and to become just and humane adults— especially for those who will serve as high-level board members and executives on Fortune 500corporations and/or adjudicate legislation and trials for our Nation’s high-ranking courts and legal institutions. By framing my seminar as a higher educational space of ethical sensitivity and analytical rigor, I inspire my students to center their own construction of knowledge that manifests beyond the mere reception of concepts and ideas. In a seminar such as this one, I emphasize that my pedagogical imperatives and initiatives center my interests in learning from and listening to all my students. I continuously challenge my students to reflect upon the ways in which Blackness dialogues fluidly with, for example, gender and sexuality; even questions of accessibility, disability, and body image. What is more, I attend to historian Herman Bennett’s contention in African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) that: “Students of the African- European encounter—whether historians of Africa, European expansion, Atlantic history, or the slave trade—display little nuance with regard to [earlier histories of power that reroute the narrative of the African diaspora beyond cultural identification and the formation of the individual” (155). To this effect, my pedagogical remixing of time, by placing the early modern past with our present twenty-first century alongside the study of popular culture, students in my seminar refine their grasp of and response to the complex ideologies and social systems that frame the process of learning itself.
With respect to the state of the field, as it pertains to Medieval and Early Modern Studies and Contemporary Critical Thought, I pose the following questions:
- What place does a sustained study of sub-Saharan Africans and their descendants have in the study our respective fields?
- What might be the ideological and political investment in, perhaps, excluding the centrality of sub-Saharan African in the training of graduate and undergraduate students?
- What can our 21st-century aestheticized expressions and practices of memorialization and popular culture teach us about the premodern and early modern pasts? I’m thinking about, for example, the iconographic image of Rosalía and Beyoncé’s new visual album Black is King as a decolonial project.
- To recapitulate the variety of topics addressed in Miguel Ángel Rosales’s Gurumbé: canciones de tu memoria negra, how do we reckon with “nuestra memoria negra” in a global(ized) Iberian world?
