Nicholas Jones’ reading list

1. The fol­lowing list gathers a group of scholars that sit­uates Blackness and early modern Iberian race rela­tions along the lines of racist buf­foonery and racist stereo­types. In short, this unit of crit­icism sees no agency, power, resis­tance, nor voice in the presence(s) and/or (European) representation(s) of black Africans in early modern Iberia. The emphasis and tone is very “white over (vs.) black.”

• Bal­tasar Fra-Molinero’s pub­li­ca­tions, espe­cially La imagen del negro en el teatro del Siglo de Oro
• John Beusterien. An Eye on Race and “Talking Black in Spanish: An Unfin­ished Black Spanish Glossary”
• John M. Lip­ski’s A History of Afro-Hispanic Lan­guage: Five Con­ti­nents, Five Centuries
• A.C. de C.M.‘s A Social History of Black Men and Freedmen in Por­tugal, 1441–1555
• Jerome Branche’s Colo­nialism and Race in Luso-Hispanic Literature
• Antonio Santos Morillo’s “La car­ac­ter­i­zación del negro en la lit­er­atura española del XVI. http://​par​naseo​.uv​.es/​L​e​m​i​r​/​R​e​v​i​s​t​a​/​R​e​v​i​s​t​a​1​5​/​0​2​_​S​a​n​t​o​s​_​A​n​t​o​n​i​o​.​pdf

2. A second list includes the following:

• José Piedra’s landmark essays: “The Black Stud’s Spanish Birth,“Callaloo 16.4 (Autumn 1993) and “Lit­erary Whiteness and the Afro-Hispanic Dif­ference” New Lit­erary History 18.2 (Winter 1987).
• Barbara Fuchs’s writings on race in Hispanism.
• Israel Bur­shatin’s essay on Eleno/a in the Queer Iberia anthology by Duke UP (1999).
• Gigi Dopico’s ch. 4 from Perfect Wives, Other Women on Sor Juana’s Los empeños per­forms excellent close readings of the char­acter Garatuza and the impor­tance of thinking about race and gender dis­si­dence in transat­lantic early modern studies.
• Josiah Black­more’s Moorings: Por­tuguese Expansion and the Writings of Africa is essential reading, espe­cially for orga­nizing and parsing out the meaning of “moor” in medieval and early modern Iberia.

3. This list includes some of Nicholas Jones’ pub­li­ca­tions on this. As he puts it “To sum­marize this body of my work, I’d say that I respond to and revise the dom­inant nar­rative about race studies (specif­i­cally sub-Saharan African Blackness) in early modern Iberian Studies at large. In other words, my research agenda and work centers African diaspora studies and Blackness in Iberian early modernity.”

• Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Per­for­mances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern (Penn State Uni­versity Press, 2019);
• Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology (Pal­grave MacMillan);
• “Casting a Lit­erary Mammy in Diego Sánchez de Bada­joz’s Farsa de la hechizera” in Uni­versity of Toronto Quarterly.
• “Sor Juana’a Black Atlantic” in His­panic Review.