Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain by Nicholas R. Jones

Abstract

Reviewed by: Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain by Nicholas R. Jones Harrison Meadows (bio) Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain nicholas r. jones Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019 222 pp. Nicholas R. Jones's book, Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain examines the politics of theatrical embodiments of Blackness on the Iberian stage from the late 1400s through the end of the seventeenth century. As is accurately acknowledged in the introduction, little attention has been given to account for the populations of sub-Saharan African descent on the Iberian Peninsula during this period, and much less toward understanding their impact on cultural production, including Jones's focus on early modern [End Page 945] Spanish theatrical practice. In this study the author launches a compelling challenge to prevailing approaches that privilege readings arguing that the performance of embodied theatrical Blackness in early modern Spain was limited to racial impersonation for the purpose of buffoonery. While Jones recognizes the widespread, even dominant performance practices that fit such a description, his analysis uncovers a wider range of possibilities for Black representation on the Iberian stage, about which he articulates two of the book's principal objectives: (1) to identify the "agentive subject positions of habla de negros speakers" on the Iberian stage from the late fifteenth through the end of the seventeenth centuries, and (2) to prove that "black populations of early modern Spain actively participated in the formation of a so-called Black Experience that thrived outside of Brazil, the Caribbean, and the U.S." (14). Jones's approach is marked by the careful application of a wide range of critical theory, while he also displays a gift for identifying meaningful links between the content of his study and eighteenth- to twenty-first-century cultural phenomena in other geographical contexts (specifically the US), including work songs of US Black American slave culture, blackface minstrelsy, and Blaxsploitation films. These comparisons serve to assist Jones as he reads against scholarship that has led to the theoretical oversimplification of the nature of early modern Black theatrical embodiment and rendered silent the Black voices that Jones recovers, voices that "challenge abjection and diffuse the supposed 'power' invested in Western racist antiblack anxieties, stereotypes and subjective insecurities" (20). In chapter 1, "Black Skin Acts: Feasting on Blackness, Staging Linguistic Blackface," Jones identifies and theorizes two categories of embodied performance of habla de negros on the early modern Iberian stage. First, the author makes the important note that Iberian staging practices did not exclude Black characters from being played by Black actors, for which Jones cites a number of examples, dedicating the most attention to La Gloria de Niquea (1622), a play written by the Conde de Villamediana. In its original staging for the court of Felipe IV, a Black actress played the allegorical character Night, alongside members of the royal family and court that made up the rest of the cast. In this section of the analysis, the author mistakenly indicates that Princess Margarita Teresa of Austria (the subject of Velazquez's famous painting Las Meninas) played the role of Beauty, when it was actually her mother, Queen Isabella of Bourbon, who played [End Page 946] the role. But this historical detail is of minor importance to the argument itself, in which Jones reads against traditional interpretations that would prioritize the implications of a reading that viewed the unnamed actress playing Night exclusively as the embodiment of the Other. Instead, he shifts the emphasis to the agency enacted by the Portuguese actress, whose entrance overshadowed the presence of the royal actors onstage thanks to her incredible singing voice ("excelentísima cantora") as chronicled by a member of the audience. The next section of the chapter is dedicated to instances of habla de negros speech acts performed through racial impersonation, which the author asserts should be considered a form of blackface, arguing that examples like the ones analyzed in the book provide evidence that blackface performance can be traced back to early modern European staging practices. Jones identifies the inseparable link between speaking...