Decentering the Archive: Black Bodies in Performance and Translation in Iberia and the Iberian Atlantic World
December 10, 2.30–4 pm
“Perra Mora: Love and War in the Body of a Woman” by K. Meira Goldberg (FIT)
The perra mora (Moorish bitch), a Spanish renaissance dance-song, is transitional between the medieval morisca, a representation of Moorishness, and the baroque zarabanda, originally a representation of exotic and lascivious Afro-American Blackness. I use flamenco dance gesture, a repository of non-White and non-elite practices, as a hook with which to approach the perra mora’s medieval ancestors. The pellizco (pinch) cues the audience’s ¡Ole¡ at the end of the verse; similarly, melody and rhyme in medieval Iberian cadences cued the audience to join in singing the estribillo (refrain)—thus memorized as a portable fragment. Do the estribillos central to flamenco today embody structures of the medieval Iberian lyric? Shifting the focus toward bodies and bodies of knowledge that have heretofore been unrecognized, I am tracing a subterranean capillary system that nourishes the European canon, but whose unique nature and constituent elements are often blanketed by the politics of Whiteness.
Meira Goldberg is a flamenco performer, teacher, and scholar. She co-curated 100 Years of Flamenco in NYC (NY Public Library for the Performing Arts, 2013). She co-edited Flamenco on the Global Stage (McFarland, 2015), The Global Reach of the Fandango in Music, Song and Dance (Cambridge Scholars, 2016), and Transatlantic Malagueñas and Zapateados in Music, Song, and Dance (Cambridge Scholars, 2019). Conference proceedings, Indígenas, africanos, roma y españoles. Ritmos transatlánticos en música, canto y baile, are forthcoming in Música Oral del Sur (vol. 17, 2020). She is currently preparing an anthology, The Body Questions: Celebrating Flamenco’s Tangled Roots (Cambridge Scholars, forthcoming 2021), and is co-authoring, with Peter Manuel and Michelle Heffner Hayes, Flamenco: History, Performance and Culture (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2021). Her monograph is Sonidos Negros: On the Blackness of Flamenco (Oxford University Press, 2019), awarded the Barnard Hewitt Award, for best 2019 book in theatre history or cognate disciplines, as well as Honorable Mention for the Sally Banes Publication Award, for best exploration of the intersections between theatre and dance/movement, both from the American Society for Theatre Research.
“Conversion, Translation, and the Making of Blackness in Colonial Cartagena de Indias” by Larissa Brewer-García (University of Chicago)
This presentation analyzes the language that enslaved black interpreters helped produce about the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of Christian blackness in the Caribbean port city of Cartagena de Indias in the seventeenth century. In identifying and parsing this language in the context of its delivery and comparing it with other writings and images about black Christian conversion from the early modern Iberian world, I argue that black interpreters circulated discourse about black beauty and black virtue that is seldom seen in other Spanish American texts from the period. The emphasis on black beauty and virtue provides a counter-narrative to the more well-known account of the seventeenth-century as the period in which associations between blackness, slavery, and abject dispossession or barbarity solidified in the Iberian Atlantic world.
Larissa Brewer-García specializes in colonial Latin American studies, with a focus on cultural productions of the Caribbean, the Andes, and the African diaspora. Within these areas, her interests include gender studies, literature and law, genealogies of race and racism, humanism and Catholicism, and translation studies. She is also a co-founder, with Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Cécile Fromont, of the Working Group on Slavery and Visual Culture (now a joint project with the University of Chicago and Yale University). Her first book, Beyond Babel: Translations of Blackness in Colonial Peru and New Granada (Cambridge University Press, 2020), examines the influence of black interpreters and spiritual intermediaries in the creation and circulation of notions of blackness in writings from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish America.
“No es país para negras and the Future of Black Spain” by Jeffrey Coleman (Marquette University)
This presentation analyzes the representation of Black femininity and body politics in Silvia Albert Sopale’s No es páis para negras (2016) as a launchpad for understanding the ways in which Black women in Spain are clamoring for recognition of their racialized and marginalized status. Whereas the representation over the last three decades has primarily been of Black men as they constituted the majority of Black migrants into Spain, our critical gaze must shift to Black women as they are the primary producers of cultural production and activism in Spain today. Figures such as Silvia Albert Sopale, Lucía Mbomío, Desirée Bela-Lobedde, and others subvert the notion of what constitutes Spanishness while also calling attention to the specific struggles that Black women face in the nation today. Thus I argue that Black women use their bodies as starting points from which to critique the societal structures that marginalize them whether on stage, in memoirs, or on social media. Thus in understanding the ways in which these women embark upon the exploration of the Black female body (particularly with regards to hair) allows us to engage with the emic knowledge production that serves to unnerve traditional notions of who is Spanish.
Jeffrey K. Coleman is an Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Languages, Literatures & Cultures at Marquette University. He has published several articles on immigration, race, and national identity in Spanish theatre and popular culture in Catalan Review, Symposium, Estreno and others. His first book, entitled The Necropolitical Theater: Race and Immigration on the Contemporary Spanish Stage (Northwestern University Press, 2020), explores how the intersections of race and immigration manifest in Spanish theatre from 1991-2016. He is also working on his next book project tentatively titled, España Negra: The Consumption & Rejection of Blackness in Contemporary Spain, which explores the ways in which Spanish media, popular culture, and literature have portrayed Blackness from the early 20th century to the present.
Moderators:
Eva Woods Peiró is a Professor of Hispanic Studies at Vassar College. She is the author of White Gypsies: Race and Stardom in Spanish Musicals (Minnesota UP, 2012) and is the co-editor of the collected volume of essays Seeing Spain: Vision and Modernity, 1868-1936 (Berg, 2005). Her current projects on Spanish film magazines of the 1920s and 30s and twenty-first century digital activist media focus on race, surveillance and migration, and aim to center a Black Studies perspective. She has hosted Undoing Racism workshops; taught Building Inclusive Communities with Latinx Poughkeepsie; and worked extensively with Conversations Unbound. She is a member of Poughkeepsie ENJAN (End the New Jim Crow Action Network), the Complete Count Census Committee/Hágase Contar, and the Arlington School District Equity Team and MBK initiative. She is a founding member of the Poughkeepsie-Oaxaca City Friendship Committee Initiative, and of Vassar’s Antiracism, Equity and Justice team.
Rafael Cesar is a Ph. D. Candidate in the Spanish and Portuguese program at NYU. His dissertation, “Fictions of Racelessness: The ‘Latin American’ Racial Imaginations of Angola (1878-2002)” examines the cultural and political translation of Brazilian and Cuban racial discourses into the 20th-century Angolan nationalism. He has conducted archival and field research in Angola, Portugal, Brazil, and Cuba supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC), and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).