Black Festive Practices in the Early Modern Iberian World: Sources and Challenges

Abstract

In the early-modern Iberian world, people of African descent engaged in festive practices both in isolation and as part of wider religious and civic communities. Based on contemporary chronicles, festival accounts and visual sources, our knowledge of these practices remains partial, both because contemporary writers and artists were largely non-Black and because these authors and artists inscribed these traditions within the Eurocentric exotic genre. In this article, I turn to festival accounts, government reports and visual sources, discuss the challenges and opportunities they present and develop diasporic, transgeographic and transtemporal methodologies allowing us to identify continuities across the Afro-Iberian diaspora.