The Queen’s Ten Bodies
By Lindsay Stern | Published on October 22, 2023
Autumn, 1640. Ten women in silver finery, nine of them carrying placards displaying the image of a queen, enter one of Mexico City’s most opulent rooms, the great hall of the viceroy’s palace. They are there to contribute a danza hablada, or spoken dance, to the most lavish festival ever before staged in the city. Celebrating the arrival of the new viceroy, the festival, which featured poetry recitals, fireworks, banquets, bullfights, and masquerades in addition to the women’s dance, lasted for four months, and cost more than the city’s annual revenue. It was a chance to boost public morale and mark the arrival of the new colonial appointee. And, as Miguel Valerio demonstrates in his pathbreaking new book, Sovereign Joy, it involved a practice that expands and enriches some of our most enduring frameworks for speaking and thinking about sovereignty today.
In The King’s Two Bodies (1957), medieval historian Ernst Kantorowicz analyzed the person of the monarch into two bodies, informed by Christian thought: the physical body that comes into being and dies and the eternal body of the kingdom itself. In Discipline and Punish (1975), Michel Foucault invoked Kantorowicz’s framework in his reflections on the birth of modern prison complexes, reading the body of the convict as the “symmetrical, inverted figure of the king.”[1] According to Foucault, just as the monarch’s surplus power duplicates his person into two distinct parts, the convict’s power deficit splits his body into a corporeal and non-corporeal aspect, or “soul,” that became the target of modern disciplinary practices.[2] Calvin Warren picks up elements of Foucault’s argument in his book Ontological Terror (2018), diagnosing anti-Black racism along similar lines. For Warren, who draws on Afropessimist frameworks, the subject called “Black” indexes both a real, living being and the terror of non-being, an instrument of Western metaphysics’ will to power.
Miguel Valerio’s Sovereign Joy advances a vision of sovereignty that challenges this intellectual lineage. With powerful implications for Black studies and political philosophy generally, within and beyond the period and region he describes, Valerio introduces evidence of a practice that stretches the concept of sovereignty beyond the sense of European royal, territorial, and racial domination. Through a subtle yet lucid examination of five sources that broaden his field’s usual repertoire of accusatory, court documents to include celebratory accounts, he shows that armed rebellion was not the only route to dignity and self-determination among Afrodescendent people. Sovereignty also involved, in the early modern Afro-Mexican contexts he examines, self-proclamation through creative, ritual celebrations. He writes:
Enslaved into a strange new world, not all Africans succumbed to tragedy, sorrow,
and…downtroddenness. Instead, they defied the ontology of that world by asserting their humanity through festive customs…They baffled white audiences by being joyful when they ewre expected to be mournful, by being independent when they were meant to be helpless, and by staging lavish displays that confounded the colonial imagination. (xi-xii).[3]
The “spoken dance” in Mexico City in 1640 is a case study in this sense of sovereignty Valerio develops, one of the rare examples of a documented practice featuring all-women protagonists. According to the description in the source Valerio analyzes, a four-folio quarto pamphlet titled Festín written by scholar and secular cleric Nicolás de Torres, the performers drew on aspects of European festival culture to stage a “bailes de negros,” a well-established Creole performative tradition. Their theme was the legend of the Queen of Sheba, the African monarch who visited King Solomon to exchange gifts and question him about philosophy. According to the biblical account, the Queen of Sheba arrived in Jerusalem with spice-laden camels, gold, and gems, and Solomon presented her with gifts in return. The silver-clad women in Mexico City rehearsed this story through their dance. In the performance, nine of them held a banner and placards displaying the meaning of the performance while one danced before the assembled guests. One side of the banner the women held depicted the meeting between Solomon and Sheba, while the other depicted the coat of arms of the viceroy. The implication of the parallel images was that the women, in dancing before the new colonial appointee, were acting out the Queen of Sheba’s meeting with King Solomon, expecting the viceroy to provide for the Black community of Mexico City as they provided for him. Their use of the terms like “estirpe” (forebears) and “Guinea” (one of several names for Africa), suggests, further, that they meant to personify, through Sheba, an imagined pan-African community. As Valerio shows, the women’s syncretic approach to the performance embraced aspects of the European festival tradition without letting those aspects steal the show: “they multiplied the body of the queen into a manifold body that embodied the polysemy of their performance.”[4]
In his brilliant analysis of this scene, Valerio invites us to witness the operation of a different sense of sovereignty than the one we might have been conditioned to expect. It’s a sovereignty defined not by a dualism between a mortal body and the eternal, immaterial soul it personifies—to be hallowed as a monarch or degraded as something like what Janelle Monáe calls the “walking dead”—but by syncretic practices of affiliation that were bold and joyfully subversive.[5] In personifying the figure of the Queen giving and receiving before King Solomon, these Afrodescendent dancers dared a colonial official not to respond to their ministrations with a commensurate offering. By integrating transregional symbols into this act of queenly personification, they also honored the heroism of those who preserved African cultural traditions through the trampling forces of the Middle Passage and what followed. As Valerio shows, it may have been membership in a confraternity, or corporate structure—the main mode of organization for Catholics in early modern times—that enabled the women to marshal resources for the new, sovereign identity they enacted. These affiliative units called “confraternities” were intersectional (you could belong to more than one at the same time), and they may have enabled the women to bypass what Valerio calls the colonial psychosis exemplified, for instance, in bans on wearing luxury fabrics to dance in their silver silks that autumn day.
Valerio’s interpretation of the women’s “spoken dance” about the Queen is just one example of the myriad contributions of Sovereign Joy to the way we speak and think about agency today. His analysis of the dance itself rewards rereading, and here I’ve highlighted just a few of its many subtle riches. In the remainder of these comments, I’ll move from what I take to be the book’s organizing principle—“sovereign joy” itself, as concept—to some of the things I most admired about it at a technical level.
In that vein, I want to highlight three examples that illustrate how Valerio responded to the challenge of documenting and analyzing what he calls, quoting Diana Taylor, “nonarchival forms of knowledge transfer” like the women’s “spoken dance.”[6] Since I’ve concentrated on the fourth chapter of Sovereign Joy , all of them are taken from this section of the book; there are many more instances to be found throughout. In each of these instances from chapter four, we see Valerio addressing the archive’s erasures, silences, and misprisions in artful and responsible ways that taught this reader a great deal, practically, about the delicate form of listening involved in research. How do we respond to the archive’s absences imaginatively but responsibly, without resorting to conjecture?
The first example of Valerio responding to this that I would invite us to notice in Sovereign Joy is how the book grapples with a silence on the part of one of his key sources: the volume containing the Festín he analyzes includes official plans for the festival drafted by the city council, none of which discuss the women’s dance itself. If this seems like a roadblock, Valerio turns it into a critical opportunity: it “suggests,” he writes, “that the cabildo [authorities] did not hire the women, but rather that the women planned their dance, preparing it and procuring all the necessary materials, and more importantly, that they may have proposed the dance themselves.” In other words: the councilmembers’ silence about the spoken dance invites us to consider that it was not an activity dictated by colonial authorities, as scholarship on such performances often assumes, but that the women were its orchestrating forces. This was plausible because in Mexico City, as Valerio shows, everyone was encouraged to contribute to public festivals, not just the ruling classes. In this way, Valerio transforms the absence of information about the practice he is investigating into a source of knowledge.
The second example comes from the Festín itself—namely, the cleric’s celebratory account of the spoken dance. It’s a strange passage—full of hedging and prevarication. As he begins to describe the women’s performance, for instance, he becomes uncomfortable, begging for patience on the part of the reader for the events he is about to describe. A hastier reader might have missed this subtlety, but Valerio reads this defensiveness and hedging on the part of the source as a window into the subversiveness of its subject matter. Scholarship on performances like the women’s often frames them as examples of assimilation to colonial dominion, a chance to highlight the psychosis of the dominator and little more. But if, as this critical tradition has suggested, these women Valerio introduces us to were simply conforming to a colonial demand to play the role of submissive vassal, why would the chronicler of their dance cower before the reader in such a way? His tone tells all. Here, again, then, in the source’s ambivalence, Valerio discovers a hidden inroad into the scene.
The third example I would highlight also comes from the Festín. It’s the part of the source manuscript that comes closest to documenting the perspective of the women themselves, albeit through the lens of their colonial observer. At first glance, the speech the cleric documents on the women’s part, painted in Latin on the placards they display, is adoring toward the viceroy. Again, a hasty reader might be tempted to read this kind of rhetoric as a painful expression of obsequiousness, yet, for Valerio, “close analysis of the performance reveals that the women deployed this deferential rhetoric in a strategic manner, which they hoped would earn them the viceroy’s goodwill.”[7] For example, on the placards they displayed as part of the dance, bearing allusions to the Queen of Sheba, they play with the dichotomy of whiteness and darkness through a sexually charged image of a dark cloud orbiting the sun. In the women’s poetry, the clouds are illuminated by the light of the sun, even as they shade it; darkness and lightness interpenetrate. This is not a simpering expression of surrender to a superior force, Valerio shows, but a bold, erotically charged exchange that leaves the sovereignty of the dancers intact and, he argues convincingly, reinforced. As they tell the viceroy: “Your bright gaze, my lord, / Does not disturb my Black nation.” Finally, for Valerio, in the context of the legend that frames the women’s dance, the devotion they express toward the viceroy implicitly implicates him in the exchange: having profited from the riches of the African Queen their bodies personify, he, like King Solomon, will have to give something back.
[1] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 29.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Miguel A. Valerio, Sovereign Joy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), xi-xii.
[4] Valerio, Sovereign Joy, 195.
[5] Janelle Monáe, “Sincerely, Jane.,” track 23 on The ArchAndroid, Atlantic Records, 2010.
[6] Valerio, Sovereign Joy, 14.
[7] Valerio, Sovereign Joy, 199.
