Neglo celebramo, pa�olo burlamo: La negrilla en Espa�a y en Am�rica by Leonardo J. Waisman (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Neglo celebramo, pañolo burlamo: La negrilla en España y en América by Leonardo J. Waisman Drew Edward Davies Neglo celebramo, pañolo burlamo: La negrilla en España y en América. By Leonardo J. Waisman. 3 vols. Published by the author, 2020. Available for download at https://conicet-ar.academia.edu/leonardowaisman (accessed 5 January 2023). In this three-volume work, possibly the most ambitious study ever undertaken of a villancico subgenre, Leonardo Waisman crafts a comprehensive yet nuanced overview of a distinct repertory of Hispanic baroque music: villancicos that feature stereotyped caricatures of Black men. Sometimes known as negrillas (among other terms) in Spanish, such villancicos tend to use racialized literary dialects and simplified musical language to depict Black Christian revelers heading to Bethlehem to adore the Christ child. A creative variant of the Adoration of the Shepherds episode in Luke, realized using popularizing elements from the Iberian theater traditions, the subgenre presents Black personages who play musical instruments and travel to Bethlehem to dance, often boisterously, to the Christ child who is sleeping in the manger. Well-known examples are "Ah siolo Flasiquiyo" by Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla (ca. 1590–1664) and "Los coflades de la estleya" by Juan de Araujo (1646–1712), the first two works of Latin American early music to enter major English-language music history textbook anthologies. Waisman bravely navigates the many types of racism present in this problematic early modern subgenre, in which the Black caricatures behave as interchangeable simpletons, the poetry contains remarks that might be considered offensive today, and the main point requires the Black caricatures to be of low social status in order to portray the humility of the circumstances of Christ's birth. The presence of Blackness also serves to underscore the Catholic Church's official universality. Waisman retains as positive an approach as possible, noting the joyfulness (alegría) of how the Black personages are cast, and thus avoiding a judgment of early modern material according to the social norms of today. That said, I believe this book needed to be written in Spanish, as English-language terminology may underscore the racist material more directly. As such, English-language authors since Robert Stevenson, who can be credited with reviving interest in the subgenre, have tended to appropriate if not hide behind Spanish-language genre, theater, and linguistics terminology. Diminutives used in Spanishlanguage terms such as negrilla, which some native Spanish speakers will connote as endearing rather than as [End Page 631] offensive, have little positive connotation that I can perceive in English. Of course, Waisman, a leading scholar of Latin American music, is well aware of these issues, and in fact he has centered the problematic racial content of the material and the discourse about it as a challenge to the scholar: "the horror of slavery and the camaraderie of the 'villancico Blacks' (negros de villancico) are its inescapable references, its irreducible poles, its extreme images. For the author, it has meant navigating between the Scylla of political correctness and the Charybdis of rationalizing racism. I hope I have avoided both" (1:2, all trans. mine). The first volume of Waisman's trilogy contains the main study, while the second and third serve as extended appendixes—the second a compilation of musical editions and the third a compilation of villancico texts, both drawn from sources throughout the Iberian peninsula and Latin America. In the study, Waisman takes a pragmatic approach, setting up the presence of Black caricatures in villancicos with chapters about the presence of African people in early modern Spain and the Americas and the linguistic elements that define the literary dialect, sometimes known as the habla de negros, that most of these villancicos use. Early in the text, Waisman presents an interesting graph (cuadro 2, p. 8) showing the distribution over time of texts in printed chapbooks at the National Library of Spain (BNE) with villancicos featuring stereotyped Black caricatures. The graph shows a clear growth of the subgenre across the seventeenth century with a peak in the 1690s, followed by a rapid decline in the first half of the eighteenth century. Waisman excels at the factual presentation of...