Radical Blackness
By Miguel A. Valerio | Published on October 15, 2020
One of the documents I have been pouring over the past seven years tells of a plot in 1612 by Mexico’s black population to kill all male Spaniards, rape the young, beautiful women, and enslave the native population. But on close inspection, the document reveals a different story. In 1611, an enslaved “Angolan” woman was beaten to death by her owner. In response, Mexico City’s black cofradías (lay Catholic associations) protested with the woman’s body in the streets of Mexico City. In so doing, they were appealing to royal decrees that forbade the excessive punishments of enslaved Afrodescendants. Yet the Audiencia (royal tribunal), which was governing the viceroyalty of New Spain in sede vacante, responded by arresting and exiling out of New Spain the leaders of the city’s black cofradías. This left the cofradías without mayordomos (executive officers), who also served as the cofradías’ ceremonial kings on festive occasions. It is difficult to ascertain what happened next. According to the official report authored by a now unknown Audiencia oidor (judge), the cofradías elected new “kings, queens, dukes, and marquises” to govern the monarquia africana (African kingdom) they would establish after violently overthrowing Spanish rule. If the cofradías elected new ceremonial royalty, this would not be the first time colonial authorities characterized these elections as initial acts of subversive plots. As a matter of fact, in 1609, an Audiencia magistrate, Luis López de Azoca (suspected to be the author of the 1612 report as well) wrote to the Council of the Indies that a group of Afro-Mexicans had elected a king, queen, “and other titles of a royal court” as part of such a plot. Likewise, close analysis of López de Azoca’s report demonstrates that what he characterized as a subversive act was nothing more than a festive coronation for a black cofradía’s Christmas celebration. In 1609, López de Azoca’s accusation did not go beyond arrest and torture, as many white residents of the city backed the black cofrades’ (cofradía members) claim that their coronation had been festive, not subversive. But in 1612, because the event had started with an outright public protest of the enslaved woman’s death, the city’s white residents feared that something sinister was afoot. With no defenders, thirty-five men and women were hanged, quartered, and their heads put on display on the city’s main gate.
As I have worked with this case over the last seven years, its contemporaneity has haunted me, from Ferguson, Missouri, to Minneapolis, Minnesota, as state terror is continuously visited upon black bodies and clamor for justice is represented in the media and by public officials as an existential threat to the status quo. In thinking about what work our research does in our contemporary world, I would like to focus on what I call radical blackness, where against the backdrop of anti-black state terror and gross misrepresentation, people of African descent formed community and built culture that defied the anti-black ontology of the colonial state. The 1612 report gained a new layer for me after I read reports of BLM protesters dancing to Afro-rhythms as they marched. I like to imagine Afro-Mexicans dancing as they protested the unnamed “Angolan” woman’s death. Viewed from this perspective, the protest does not constitute a disruption, but a continuum of their life of “joyful defiance,” to adapt a phrase of Imani Perry. So that what I call radical blackness can be sum up as affirming black Being and sovereignty in an anti-black world, a world where being black meant not Being, as Calvin L. Warren argues in Ontological Terror. I see this exemplified in the Afro-colonial tradition that has occupied most of my days for the last seven years: festive black royalty. As Perry invited us to do in the Atlantic piece where the phrase I adapted above defines blackness as an “immense and defiant joy,” radical blackness wants to look at how Afro-colonial festive and Catholic practices joyfully defied the anti-black ontology of the reigning slavocracy. Looking at radical blackness as a transhistorical modus essendi, we can see how the black struggle has always included joy as one of its central ingredients, defying a world that wanted down-trodden blacks. Imagine Afro-Mexicans returning to their festive traditions after one of their principal practices was used as an excuse to silence their clamor for justice. As Perry contends, joy (as a portion of black Being concomitant with defiance) has brought us thus far. The festive traditions that we study show how African joy became American defiance as black lives (any existence outside the labor regime) was a priori antithetical to the project of Modernity. This antithesis remains part of our present, and therefore, our joy too remains defiant.
For my second book project, Radical blackness: Afro-creole subjectivities in the Americas, 16th-18th centuries, which expands on my first book project, “With their king and queen”: Afro-Mexican festive practices, 1539–1640, I have identified several modes of radical blackness I wish to explore. These include radical sovereignty, radical faith, radical joy, and radical death. Radical sovereignty explores the symbolic sovereignty enacted by ceremonial black royalty and the self-governance exercised by cofradías. Radical faith explores the fusion of African and Catholic beliefs in cofrades’ faith practices. This chapter will analyze the churches Afro-Brazilian irmandades (the Portuguese for cofradías) built in Brazil, where this fusion took material form in architecture and visual art. This chapter, a preview of which will appear in the next issue of Colonial Latin American Review, also studies black artistic patronage, which has gone unstudied for far too long. Radical joy studies other festive practices beyond ceremonial royalty. This chapter pays attention to how Afrodescendants, black and mixed-race, used the material culture of Iberian festival traditions to make public statement about their identity and economic prowess. Radical death explores the creolization of death carried out by cofradías and irmandades, which took the body to church, prayed the Rosary for the soul of the deceased, bury members in religious habits, but also danced on the way to the grave and feasted at the wake, for example, thereby fusing African and Catholic mortuary practices. Radical blackness resides in the autonomy Afro-Latin Americans exercised in shaping these practices and their own lives according to a creole subjectivity that challenged the anti-black ontology of African slavery. Radical blackness therefore speaks of the autonomy people of African descent have always exercised in shaping their existence (against the backdrop of a theory of slavery as social death) despite the ontological terror of the historical moment.
Finally, irmandades are still central to the lives of many Afro-Brazilian communities, especially in Minas Gerais and Bahia. However, lately these institutions have come under attack from fundamentalist evangelicals, who – echoing old familiar colonial language – call them “heathen institutions.” As the Brazilian government becomes more and more entangled with white supremacist evangelicals, the government itself threatens to ban irmandades. Thus, a living institution that has sustained black lives is now threatened by the anti-black state. Like the 1612 report cited above, this reminds us that our research of the past is never too far from the present. Many of the documents we study could still be headlines today.
