Black Voices in Early Modern Spanish Literature, 1500-1750

Abstract

This book recovers a missing chapter in the history of Afro-Iberian diasporas. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, black women and men—enslaved, free(d), and half-manumitted—resided in the Iberian peninsula, particularly as a result of the transatlantic slave trade. This renovated the period’s human, urban, and social landscapes. In exploring Spain’s role in the Atlantic slave trade, and the cultural forms of the period, the book pictures the black African diaspora’s broad yet unexplored literary impact. It transforms our understanding of blackness in early modern Spanish literary activities by providing new readings of the era’s literary texts, unearthing new documents about black communities, and creating a space for black poets in the literary cannon of early modernity. This book stands at the crossroads between the history of Spanish literature in Spain and that of black African diasporas, two disciplines that have not fully entered into dialogue before. While the study of Spanish literature in Spain has disregarded the black African presence or seen it as merely echoing the voices of white poets of early modernity, the studies of black African diasporas have focused on more recent times and on different geographical areas such as English- and French-speaking countries, and the Caribbean where the Hispanic world is concerned. Black Voices builds a bridge between these two fields and promote a lively scholarly debate in an area that clearly merits academic study. The archaeological explorations of all manners of archives that form the research behind this book bring to the fore a meaningful Black archive long forgotten.