Nicholas R. Jones

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

Nicholas R. Jones (Yale) is the former 2021-2022 King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center’s (KJCC) Scholar-in-Residence at New York University. He is the author of the prize-winning Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (Penn State University Press, May 2019) and co-editor of Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology (Palgrave, December 2018) and Pornographic Sensibilities: Imagining Sex and the Visceral in Premodern and Early Modern Spanish Cultural Production (Routledge, January 2021) with Chad Leahy. Jones also co-edits the Routledge Critical Junctures in Global Early Modernities book series with Derrick Higginbotham. Jones’s research has been generously supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and he is completing his second solo-authored monograph entitled Cervantine Blackness. Jones has also held visiting appointments at Georgetown University and New York University.