Ireri Chávez Bárcenas

Roundtable: Sounding/Voicing/Embodying Blackness in the Early Modern Iberian World

Abstract

Since the publication of Nicholas R. Jones’s book Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain, wide interest in and the study of black dance, soundscapes, and voices has exploded in academic circles within early modern Iberian Studies on both sides of the Atlantic. Focusing on sonic Blackness and textuality, this roundtable engages Jones’s work on black dances and black musical practices/tradition active in early modern Iberia, New Spain, and the Caribbean. Cesar Favila considers the early modern vocal archive and reflects on aurality with respect to the African Baroque among the inhabitants of New Spain’s cloistered convents. The materiality of black women’s bodies comes to the fore in a sonic and gendered critique of seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century Catholic narratives on the nature of temporal and eternal salvation. Ireri Chávez Bárcenas traces the performance of Blackness in cathedral villancicos informed by the Black festive practices of the African diaspora in New Spain. The recovery of defiant voices and expressions of collective identity in this repertoire amplifies the lived experiences of free and enslaved men and women of African descent that resisted or negotiated the restrictive structures imposed by Spanish rule. Bernard Gordillo Brockmann
explores a sensorial environment of the Spanish colonial cathedral coro in which constructed black women’s voices sang in devotion to God. The villancico de negro serves as a sonic-textual liminal space in which the Spanish and mestizo male gaze embodied and appropriated Blackness. Nicholas Jones’s intervention attends to the powerful ways Black Performance Studies and Black Sound Studies can productively impact and nuance the study of Blackness in Early Modern Iberian Studies writ large.

Bio

Ireri Chávez-Bárcenas is Assistant Professor of Music at Bowdoin College. She holds a doctoral degree in musicology from Princeton University and a master’s degree in religion and music from Yale University. She received the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend Award for her book project Singing in the City of Angels: Race, Identity, and Devotion in Early Modern Puebla de los Ángeles. Her work analyzes the performance of villancicos within the institutional and social fabric of Puebla de los Ángeles and develops a new methodology for the study of function, meaning, and transmission of the vernacular song tradition in the Spanish empire. She has published journal articles and essays on the intersection of villancicos and early modern ideas of race, religion, and identity in New Spain, and the adaptation of conflicting historiographical interpretations of the conquest of Mexico in Vivaldi’s opera Motezuma.