Papers by Nicholas R Jones
Black women abound in the cultural history and literary production of early modern Iberia. Omnipr... more Black women abound in the cultural history and literary production of early modern Iberia. Omnipresent, Black women lived in Renaissance urban centers across Portugal and Spain, such as the cosmopolitan cities Lisbon and Seville. These women’s names, Antonia, Boruga, Catalina, Dominga, Francisca, Guiomar, Margarita, Lucrecia, and Sofía, to list only a handful, have also been reproduced in literature across all literary genres and documented in many archives. Paying close attention to articulations of agency, beauty, and resistance, this chapter analyzes and sheds light on the underexamined and undertheorized cultural and literary legacies of Black women in early modern Portugal and Spain. In doing so, the chapter argues for highlighting Iberian Black women’s agency, authority, and power – each codified in forms of Africanized Iberian dialects, material culture, and sartorial style – in order to destabilize and revise present-day critics’ and readers’ misguided and misunderstood perceptions of early modern Iberian Black women as obscenely hypersexual and brutishly weak.
European History Quarterly, 2023
This essays enlists the strategies, methodologies, and insights of Black Studies into the service... more This essays enlists the strategies, methodologies, and insights of Black Studies into the service of Early Modern Studies and vice versa. What motivates my research and sustains my love for solving the mysteries surrounding the contradictorily complex Black lives in pre-Enlightenment Iberia manifests in the methodology of close reading, the analysis of material and visual cultures, and the arguing for the primacy of politics customary, intellectual, and juridical in mediating the earliest contacts between sub-Saharan Africans and Europeans.
Bulletin of the Comediantes
Guest Editor's prologue to "Recovering Black Performance in Early Modern Iberia" double special i... more Guest Editor's prologue to "Recovering Black Performance in Early Modern Iberia" double special issue in Bulletin of the Comediantes.
We invite submissions to A Cultural History of Trans Lives in the Early Modern Age (1450-1650), e... more We invite submissions to A Cultural History of Trans Lives in the Early Modern Age (1450-1650), edited by Nicholas R. Jones and Sawyer K. Kemp. Although the early modern period has long been a rich subject area for critique across the study of gender, race, and sexuality, the field of Early Modern Trans Studies has emerged in the last several years as differentiated from earlier feminist, gender studies, and queer theory approaches. As such, it emphasizes the transhistorical politicization of certain kinds of bodies and the biopolitical machinery of state- and church-endorsed sex and gender categories. As a field, Trans Studies has sometimes functioned as a corrective, asking, for instance: what can Trans Studies do with (or for) Early Modern Studies, other than simply applying a new set of theory buzzwords to “cross-dressing” narratives? As the field has grown, it further queries: What can contemporary trans life help illuminate about gender policing and racial profiling in historical eras? How can contemporary trans theory’s emphasis on intersectionality help us navigate the racialization of sex and gender norms in a period of European colonial expansion, intercultural trade, and travel? How might these questions, we ask, play out in non-Western geographies, histories, and paradigms? This volume, A Cultural History of Trans Lives in the Early Modern Age (1450-1650), will explore and expand these conversations by bringing historical texts, events, objects, persons, and phenomena into dialogue with rich questions and topics in trans studies.
Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 2023
University of Toronto Quarterly, 2020
This article analyses the theatrical representation of an unnamed black woman in Diego Sánchez de... more This article analyses the theatrical representation of an unnamed black woman in Diego Sánchez de Badajoz's Farsa de la hechizera (1523/1540-49). In doing so, I employ the term "mammy"-and, more loosely, the Castilian word "nodriza"-in order to capture an interdisciplinary mode of literary criticism that resituates Sánchez de Badajoz's black woman character in Renaissance Iberian cultural and literary studies. A non-passive agent who possesses traits analogous to maternal mammy figures across the African diaspora, this study argues that Sánchez de Badajoz's black woman personage subverts the work's suicidal galán's aristocratic might and ultimately destabilizes his masculinity. To that end, this article sets out to demonstrate, more broadly, that scholarly interpretations of black women in early modern Iberia have overlooked the heterogeneous and subversive ways in which these women paradoxically oscillate between the an-tinomies of objectification and personhood.
Colonial Latin American Review, 2020
postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, 2019
Preserved in the archives of the National Historic Archive in Madrid, the life story of Catalina ... more Preserved in the archives of the National Historic Archive in Madrid, the life story of Catalina Muñ oz uncovers the ways in which she, as a triply marginalized subject-black, woman, and slave-obtained power and social clout by capitalizing on the fame she acquired because of her role as spiritual advisor and healer to the Valencian religious community of Sanct Martín Church. This essay positions Catalina as an astute agent and spiritual advisor who navigated with savvy the intricacies of Valencia's sixteenth-century religious elite. In doing so, the article aims to reassign and parse Catalina's agency as a prophet. It is through the caveat of prophecy where Catalina obtains her power and position by capitalizing on the fame-often referred to as 'escá ndolo' ['scandal']-she acquired as a spiritual advisor and healer to the Valencian religious communities. (2019) 10, 36-49.
Hispanic Review, 2018
In this essay, I devise the term Hispanic Black Atlantic as a critical tool and discursive geogra... more In this essay, I devise the term Hispanic Black Atlantic as a critical tool and discursive geographical space to rethink and revisit Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic model. I envision Sor Juana’s colonial Mexican milieu as an integral part of the African diaspora and the Black Atlantic paradigm forged by Gilroy. To move the literary criticism of Sor Juana’s poetic corpus toward a new conversation about colonial Spanish American literature and the multilingual world it reflects, I use Sor Juana’s villancicos to trace her avowal of Blackness—in its ideological and racial dimensions—as a critical category that travels across space and time while simultaneously turning on its head assumptions and claims about Blackness altogether.
At the turn of the seventeenth century, many of Spain's major cities had large sub-Saharan Africa... more At the turn of the seventeenth century, many of Spain's major cities had large sub-Saharan African populations. In the literature of the Spanish baroque period, black Africans—either enslaved or free—appeared as both central and marginal characters. Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas's poem " Boda de negros " (1643) concerns itself with the poetic representation of this black population. I propose in this article that Quevedo utilizes " Boda de negros " as a response to Spain's imperial crisis and deterioration during the second half of the seventeenth century. The terms " crisis " and " lo cursi, " as I will employ them throughout this essay, will serve as key words to exemplify how Quevedo denounces, yet at the same time complicates subversively, his black African protagonists' misuse and misrepresentation of traditional Spanish wedding customs. At the conclusion of this study, I ask the following question: are black Africans ever capable of possessing good taste?
Public Engagement by Nicholas R Jones
Routledge
Early Modernities focuses on archives-historical, literary, visual-that link the analytics of cri... more Early Modernities focuses on archives-historical, literary, visual-that link the analytics of critical theory and cultural studies to the early modern period in locations across the globe from 1400 to 1700. The series publishes monographs and/or edited volumes that reflect upon how early modern texts, cultural modes of expression, and visual ideations from Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe, and/or the South Pacific speak into or resonate with contemporary debates on gender, race, sexuality, and ability. In doing so, we invite books that deploy feminist, queer, critical race or disability approaches to texts, with the purpose not only of scrutinizing their socio-political meanings, but also of creating new archives that reframe different aspects of early modernity within and outside of Europe.
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Papers by Nicholas R Jones
Public Engagement by Nicholas R Jones
“Protest and Dissimulation: Muslims and Other Minorities in the Spanish-Speaking World” will explore the challenges faced by religious and ethnic minority communities in the Spanish-speaking world from the Middle Ages through the present day and examine the strategies that those communities used to resist, circumvent, survive, and even flourish under the pressure of those challenges. Through discussion and conversation, the evening will yield questions and modes of thinking that are grounded in the unique histories, literatures, and cultures of the Spanish-speaking world and that participants, attendees, and discussants can carry with them out into the wider contemporary world that is presenting its own evolving set of challenges to many modern communities.
This round-table and teach-in will take place on Thursday, December 1, from 6-8pm in the Great Room of 13-19 University Pl. A light supper will be served and attendees are encouraged to continue the discussion over the meal. The event will be live-streamed and archived online.
Speakers will include:
Farah Dih, NYU: "A Caste Society in the First Spanish Modernity"
Erica Field, NYU: “Dissimulation, Piety, and Fear”
Sibylle Fischer, NYU: "Stop Whining: On Politics of Racelessness and Executive Violence in Spanish America"
Nicholas Jones, Bucknell University: “Do Black Lives Matter in Spanish Early Modernity? Blackness, Cognitive Dissonance, Dissimulation”
Seth Kimmel, Columbia University: “The Ends of Multiculturalism”
S.J. Pearce, NYU: “Medieval Jews and Muslims in the Modern Nation”
A searing work of literary criticism and political debate, Cervantine Blackness speaks to specialists and nonspecialists alike—anyone with a serious interest in Cervantes’s work who takes seriously a critical reckoning with the cultural, historical, and literary legacies of agency, antiblackness, and refusal within the Iberian Peninsula and the global reaches of its empire.
Focusing on Spanish Golden Age theater and performative poetry from authors such as Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Rueda, and Rodrigo de Reinosa, Jones makes a strong case for revising the belief, long held by literary critics and linguists, that white appropriations and representations of habla de negros language are “racist buffoonery” or stereotype. Instead, Jones shows black characters who laugh, sing, and shout, ultimately combating the violent desire of white supremacy. By placing early modern Iberia in conversation with discourses on African diasporic studies, Jones showcases how black Africans and their descendants who built communities in early modern Spain were rendered legible in performative literary texts.
Accessibly written and theoretically sophisticated, Jones’s groundbreaking study elucidates the ways that habla de negros animated black Africans’ agency, empowered their resistance, and highlighted their African cultural retentions. This must-read book on identity building, performance, and race will captivate audiences across disciplines.
de 2020 se originó un intenso debate en los medios de comunicación y
las redes sociales sobre la actualidad del escritor, su función como
icono de la cultura del imperio español en un contexto post-colonial y
post-imperial, la funcionalidad de las estatuas en el espacio público y
el compromiso del mundo académico con los movimientos sociales
como Black Lives Matter. Primero, una serie de académicos expondrán
sus particulares visiones del evento. Después, el acto se abrirá a los
asistentes. Este debate, que utiliza las nuevas tecnologías de la
información, es un intento de establecer un espacio de comunicación
fértil, un ágora o “mentidero” digital, una academia de Argamasilla... JULIO VÉLEZ-SAINZ