Blackening European Modernities Dis-Covering An-Other Europe. Agustín Lao-Montes
Blackening European Modernities Dis-Covering An-Other Europe. Agustín Lao-Montes
Blackening European Modernities Dis-Covering An-Other Europe. Agustín Lao-Montes
Agustin Lao-Montes
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Looking at modern histories through the lens of Afro-Hispanic difference should imply
a necessary correspondence of its meanings as a historical era, a set of political forms and
In contrast, I will argue that theorizing from the geo-historic and epistemic location of
Afro-Hispanic difference could imply a radical break with the episteme that produce
these conventional concepts of both Europe and modernity. First it means a change in the
empires, legalities, cultures, social movements, and subjectivities, tracing back all of
these modern forms and formations to the crucial period that runs between what Abu-
Lughod calls the 13th Century world-system to Braudel’s long 16th Century (1450-1650).
It also means revisiting the very idea of Europe in relation to its internal borders and
we cannot minimally engage the debates on the origins of world capitalism and the rise of
Europe to world power, but should state that the emergence in 1492 of the Atlantic
system as the epicenter of a long-term process of globalization mark the beginnings of the
modern era. One of my main contentions is that the configuration in 1492 of Spain as the
first Absolutist state and as the first trans-territorial overseas empire, are pillars in the
constitution of the historical system that we call capitalist modernity. In 1492 the fall of
Muslim Granada to Christian forces opened the gates for the formation of the first
European central state with a standing army that eventually along with the imposition of
the Castilian grammar of Nebrija to its territory and the organization of the inquisition as
a state apparatus of surveillance and coercion, constitute the first forms of the modern
state. In the same vein, the organization of a trans-territorial overseas empire with novel
human classification and stratification (namely the rise of racial categories such as
“Indio”, “Negro”, y “Mestizo”), sat the stage for the structuration of new global
persist until today in spite of all the significant changes and ruptures in world-history that
Anibal Quijano conceptualizes with the notion of the coloniality of power. To put it in a
nutshell the concept of the coloniality of power serves as a key theoretical representation
resistance that compose the longue duree of modern constellations of power. It can be
of domination: capitalism, racism, imperialism, and patriarchy, which frame key global
identity, subjectivity, and embodiment (both political and individual bodies). In this
building, the rise of world capitalism, and the corresponding civilizational and legal
modes of classification and stratification that emerged at the Iberian Peninsula in the long
sixteenth century. Thus, one of our arguments here is that modern categories of
peoplehood (namely race, ethnicity, and nationality) owe much to the extension a
Mediterranean contact zone centered on the Al-Andalus region of the Iberian Peninsula to
the trans-Atlantic contact zone that articulated Europe, Africa, and the Americas in the
aftermath of 1492.
The concept of contact zone as coined by Mary Louise Pratt signifies an imperial region
of uneven developments and unequal exchanges of wealth and power but also of complex
the 13th Century world-system that included what today we call Europe, North Africa,
part of Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, East Asia, and the Ottoman Empire, the Al-
Andalus region that today is Southern Spain was one of the epicenters of the Islamic
world. A long history of wars between Islam and Christianity and the variety of cultures
had made it into a rich contact zone for articulations and negotiations of identity and
difference. The so-called reconquest war is a Spanish nationalist fallacy that reduces
close to eight centuries of violent conflict over land, cultural and religious hegemony, to
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an epic of recovery of a nation that did not exist before its invention in modernity. But
several hundred years of Islamic rule and Christian contestation and its location in-
between historic worlds (e.g., North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Iberia) made the Al-
Andalus into a multicultural space wherein modern racial discourse will be rehearse.
After the rise of Christian hegemony in the 13th Century, a faith-based proto-racial
of “purity of blood”. The use of a corporeal-biological analogy along with the cultural-
religious criteria pointed toward the match of natural and cultural elements in modern
racial discourse. But such racial imaginary and its universal schemes of classification and
stratification will not be fleshed-out and developed until the so-called discovery of the
Americas in 1492 which came along the mass expulsion of Arabic Moors and Zephardic
Modernity was invented in the Caribbean as put by philosopher Enrique Dussel, but in
we should talk about the simultaneous invention of the Americas, Africa, and Europe, as
that simultaneously produced Africa, Europe, and the Americas, that we should locate
The approximate dates of Juan Latino are between his birth circa 1518 until his death in
1596 or 1597. Hence his times are mark by the European Renaissance and the beginnings
of the conquest of the Americas and the institution of chattel slavery. This early modern
expressed in the idea of the Americas as the West Indies (or the future of Europe), in the
coining of the legal concept of “rights of peoples” as articulated in the debate between
Las Casas and Sepulveda about the humanity and legal rights of Amerindians, and in the
represented in various versions of the great chain of being. Thus, when Juan Latino self-
identified as been of Ethiopian origin he was functioning from within and somehow
Juan Latino was submitted to slavery as a child since he was born either in Africa or
Spain (given that his place of birth is contested). Very early in his life he became a slave
of Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordoba, Duke of Sessa who resided in Baena, Spain. In 1530
they moved to Granada where in light of his extraordinary intellectual talents Juan was
allow to attend Latin grammar classes with his owner up to the university level. At the
Grammar in 1546, becoming a master of the field in 1556. In this context he studied with
the prominent Latin grammarian Pedro de Motta and became a protégée of Granada’s
at the University and got married with Ana Carleval who was the daughter of the
administrator of the estate of the Duke de Sessa who ended emancipating Juan from his
slave status. Juan Latino eventually came to be a laureate poet of the city of Granada, and
a prominent professor and scholar who published various books of poetry and essays. His
marriage with a white woman from the aristocracy and his mastery of the highest levels
of literacy in a time in which reason and humanity itself was founded on been a man of
letters, de fact granted Juan Latino what critic Jose Piedra characterize nowadays as
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literary whiteness. However, he remained named in the next generation by writers of the
Spanish Golden Age as “El Negro Juan Latino” and kept identifying himself as an
Ethiopian Black. Let’s examine the content and implications of these historical clues.
Originally named Juan de Sessa, he renamed as Latino instead of the pejorative Ladino
in light of having achieved the highest levels of literacy in both Castilian and Latin. In
(DQ 1: 27)
“Since Heaven did not want me to be as well spoken as black Juan Latino, I prefer not to
speak all that Latin stuff.” Here what is salient is that Cervantes, a contemporary of Juan
Latino, recognizes him for his erudition at the same time that labels Juan as “el negro”
while enunciating a defense of the Castilian vernacular. But for Juan Latino, who was
marked by the imperial gaze on his dark body, by the existential modern condition of
racial difference that Fanon signified as “the fact of blackness”, mastery of latin became a
source of symbolic capital, an intellectual tool of power. In an address to King Philip II,
that Juan Latino published in the book Austrias Carmen Juan Latino wrote:
New things want a new poet at the service of kings./ This victory at sea has not reached /
your ears yet, Sire. This writer was not born in these parts of the world / His name is
Latinus, and he came from the lands of Ethiopia / to sing the deeds of Juan de Austria
with the admirable art of poetry. / Unconquered Philip, on his bended knee this singer
asks / to be your brother’s poet. / If the wars of the Austriad make the poet famous,/ the
poet’s blackness will make Don Juan a phoenix.
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What is remarkable about this stanza is the expression of what DuBois analyzes as double
from the lands of Ethiopia while he declared his loyalty to the Spanish monarchy and the
empire of Philip II. I contend that in this text we have the first written statement from an
Afro-diasporic subject who claims a relation with Africa while identifying as subject-
citizen of a European state and western culture, but in search of equality, hence the
request “to be your brother poet”. This is clearly demonstrated in another stanza where
Because if my black face displeases your ministers, oh king, a white one is not pleasant
either among the Ethiopians. Anyone visiting the parts of the East will not be held in
esteem if he looks white. Noblemen there are all black, and so is their king.
Writing in a time in which the denial of African humanity was common sense within
the rising occidentalist discourses, this claim of black nobility, together with the
denunciation of racist displeasure with the black face along with the placing of African
lack of esteem toward white looks in the same plane, was a clear act of transgression.
This begs the question of why Juan Latino was not declared persona non grata or
destituted from professorship. Here comes to surface some other features that account for
the specificity of Afro-Hispanic difference. The first is that black bodies and African
subjects had inhabited the Iberian Peninsula for hundred of years so they were more
familiar there that in the rest of Europe. A more substantive consideration is that Afro-
Hispanics, played different roles in the Spanish empire since its very inception. They
accompanied Columbus in his trips to the new world and eventually served as cultural
In a similar fashion, Juan Latino lived in Granada in a time in which Spanish imperial
power was contested in its interior front. He lived through what is known as the 1568 War
of Alpujarras, a revolt by Moriscos of Islamic descent against the Spanish Catholic state.
Juan Latino went through pains to establish his difference as a Black Catholic of
Ethiopian Christian descent, from North Africans of Islamic faith and/or descent. In
performing this task he used the same occidentalist racial logics that he had partly
transgressed. His deeper project was to take Catholic universalism to its ultimate
against Islam, and establishing the humanity of blacks as people of letters and therefore
as the antithesis of the slave. Taking into account that in the ideology of the Renaissance
humanity and reason were established on the basis of literacy and dominion of a Christian
humanization and a tool of empowerment for Juan Latino. But Juan Latino’s particular
experiences of African slaves both in the Americas and in Europe. His claim was not to
overthrow the imperial regime of slavery itself (as it would be the aims of T’oussaint
L’Overture and Olaudah Equiano in the 18th Century) but to transform the empire from
within with the inclusion of African Christians within imperial forms of citizenship. His
contradictory social location within the empire framed a fragmented racial consciousness
of a subject that at the same time who affirmed his Africanity and his Blackness defended
the universalist project of the Spanish Catholic empire. Furthermore, a strong anti-Islamic
and anti-Turkish edge also revealed an Orientalist ideology that was sustained by an
Occidentalist commitment to Latin letters and Renaissance humanism. In this sense, Juan
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internal narrative of what Walter Mignolo calls the darker side of the Renaissance. In
interpreting his take on the dialectic of freedom and slavery, an important consideration
may be that been located at the heart of Empire in Europe, Juan Latino did not have direct
contact with the everyday terror of chattel slavery. His own idea of Africa was somehow
abstract and mediated by his location as an elite intellectual in Granada which may partly
explain his sharp distinction between North Africa and Ethiopia and the metonymic
Now, what are some of the points of reflection for our current project of Black
European Studies, that we can infer from this rich and complex story of an Afro-diasporic
intellectual who played quite central roles in early modern Europe? What politics of
memory are at stake? What values can we extrapolate from the history of Juan Latino for
mode of decolonial critique. In search of economy of words and time, I will lay-out three
set of arguments.
The first set of contentions can be summarize by arguing that stories such as Juan
Latino’s allow us to unsettle hegemonic narratives of Europe and to rethink Europe from
the standpoint of its margins and internal others. As stated before, engaging the
problematic of modernity from the perspective of the early modern Spanish empire
implies a genealogy of the modern that challenges the convention of equating it with the
Europe in hegemonic Occidentalist narratives wherein the so-called west is the “heart of
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recognizing that Juan Latino played a key role at the same time that remained relatively
marginal in the first modern empire, means writing Afro-Hispanic difference within the
central narrative not only of the Hispanic world but of modernity itself. For instance, in
addition to the reference in Don Quixote, Diego Ximenes de Enciso wrote a play for “El
Negro Juan Latino” that could be considered the first literary text dedicated to a black
subject by a white European author. This play, along with featuring of Juan Latino and his
wife Ana Carleval in Lope de Vega’s La Dama Boba register Black European subjects
within the theatre and literature of the Spanish Golden Age. A more general implication
will be the resignification of Spain and Europe that will entail a challenge to the very
ideology of the west, now seen through the lens of its hidden and forgotten domestic
others, internal borders, and European peripheries. For instance, hegemonic narratives of
Europe tend to render Ireland relatively invisible or to confine her to the margins of the
British world. In opposition to this, Irish postcolonial theory articulates a challenge from
with an intend and effect of deconstructing and reconstructing the very concept of
Europe. One of my main contentions here is that a critical Black European Studies have
problematizing and resignifying the very idea of Europe. This kind of critical endeavor
will also imply a globalization of European Studies, a mundializacion (as in Spanish and
cultural category. This hermeneutical strategy involves reading the inscription of its
others (both internal and external) into the history, culture, and identity of Europe. In this
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throughout European history, but also the crucial influence of Africa and its diaspora in
the historical formations and transformations of the region, let’s say to use shorthand
from the constitutive character of the institution of chattel slavery for the rise of the
Eurocentered capitalist modernity in the long 16th Century, to the centrality of the 18th and
19th Century Haitian Revolution and Abolitionist Movement, and the U.S. Black Freedom
Movement in the 1960s and 70s for the theory and praxis of modern democracy and for
European polities and social movements in particular. Hence, what I am suggesting here
is not simply to provintialize Europe’s false claim of universality that is based on a given
The second set of questions I am bringing to the table can be place under the rubric of
Subaltern Studies and in relation to what some of us call Subaltern Modernities. The
concept itself imply that there are other forms of modernity besides the western version
modernity that denotes a plurality of historical spaces that are intertwined in complex
as a by-product of the French Revolution, but a more nuanced reading will reveal how the
slave revolt in Saint Domingue changed the course of the French Revolution, but more so
how this “unthinkable event” in the Occidentalist imaginary (as put by Michel Trouillout)
was not only led by Black Jacobins like T’Oussaint L’Overture (to use CLR James’
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expression), but also by maroon band leaders and voodoo priests like Broukman and
Makandal who remained altogether outside the republic of letters. Such subaltern
modernities forged translocal undercurrents of slave rebellion that ran from the U.S.
South, to Brazil, Colombia, and Cuba. This example brings to surface the need to
distinguish between different forms and levels of subalternity, an issue that is revealed by
the contradictory locations of Juan Latino within the Spanish empire. In fact, we can
identify two currents of Afro-diasporic thought, culture, and politics, one literate and able
to master the master’s discourse (we can call this Caliban’s Reason) and another one not
necessarily literate and more grounded on Afro-diasporic vernacular cultures (we can call
this Subaltern Reason). Arguably, the antinomies of Juan Latino as an elite black placed
at the heart of whiteness, exemplify some of the contradictions and dilemmas of Afro-
European intellectuals of been both inside and outside and of engaging in critique of
western regimes of power and knowledge with the discursive categories of the west.
To end this part I will like to raise the question of continuity of anti-Islamic and racist
discourses in today’s Spain. Even though the Spanish empire was finally dismantled as a
discourse of Hispanophilia was manifest in two critical junctures for this construction of
the Spanish nation and self as imperial, the 500 years of the so-called discovery in 1992,
and the 100 years of what was remembered with nostalgia for the loss empire in 1998.
Today, when Spain serves as a southern border and entry gate for North Africans and
The revival of racial nationalism comes along with an exclusionary definition of Europe
that is entirely oblivious of the Islamic and African past and remainings especially of
southern Spain. Anti-Arab/Anti-Islamic racism is so fierce that research shows how its
manifestations are more violent that the xenophonic racism against South American and
Hispanic Caribbean immigrants who are negatively label as Sudacas. Research shows
that even immigrants from the Dominican Republic who are of darker color, seem to
experience less hardships than North Africans in contemporary Spain. This suggests
constitutive of hegemonic discourses of race and nation in today’s Spain. Hence, a critical
and culture, should a crucial task within which Afro-Hispanic difference can play a
crucial role.
The third and last set of arguments concerns the relationship between Black European
Studies and a current project that some of us interpret as a decolonial turn in both
epistemic and ethical-political terms. This requires a quick return to the beginning of the
presentation where I introduced the concept of the coloniality of power as a primary tool
is a world-historical pattern of power that means far more than colonialism or direct
through the history of capitalist modernity, an uneven process that entails revealing and
dismantling the multiple forms and mediations of the coloniality of power. In this
racial regimes in the matrix of the coloniality of power and given the enduring location of
African and Afro-diasporic subjects at the very bottom of racial hierarchy, Black
struggles and racial politics are crucial in the longue duree of world decolonization as
Coming to Frankfurt makes me think of what constitutes critical theory, what should be
the meaning of critique within Black European Studies. Arguably, it means not only
Caribbean Philosophical Association, but also centering the question of racism in the
critique of domination, and expanding the authors, texts, and probematique of European
thought. For instance, what is the relationship of DuBois with Germany when his
dissertation on slavery changed the course of historical sociology and given that Max
Weber admits that as his student the eminent black intellectual changed his formerly
biological concept of race? Should Cesaire be considered not only a Caribbean but an
Afro-diasporic European thinker who was of great influence to surrealism and whose
western thought? All of these questions are derive from a more general one which is: how
to clearly incorporate Black Europe within a critical discourse of the worldwide African
diaspora? To problematize and develop this concept of the global African diaspora as a
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geo-historical category that is composed by other categories such as nation, empire, and
region is part of our critical task. Methodologically this entails engaging in research such
as comparative empire and across nation-states at the same time that we adopt the African
To close, I want to argue that the African diaspora is a complex and discontinuous
constellation of local, national, and regional histories loosely linked by the ties that bind
York, and Afro-Cubanismo in la Habana in the 1930s and 1940s, and the global
movements against colonialism and racism in the 1960s and 1970s. Today, the challenge
which the relatively invisible diasporas such as the Black European and Afro-Latino
could be play a major role from their specific regional locations. The challenge is a
double one of building bridges between the different local, national, and regional spaces
of the global African diaspora while reciprocally learning from differences, and building
a racial politics to oppose racism at the same time that we can develop a transformative
epistemology and politics. That’s why contra Habermas instead of the incomplete project
of modernity we talk about the incomplete project of decolonization. In this tune, more
on Colonialism that facism expressed the colonial violence of Europe within its own
territorial spaces. The anti-racist revolt in France today and the governmental recycling of
old imperial policies such as curfew, reveal fortress Europe as a mode of recolonization.
The urgency of a critical Black European Studies could be now on the limelight of the