Cervantine Blackness

On July 3, 2020, I co-authored an Op-ed in the online venue Ctxt: contexto y acción titled “Cervantes y la materia de las vidas negras.” In this piece, I opined that previous conversations about the vandalization of a statue of Miguel de Cervantes in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park had failed to mention, let alone nuance, Cervantes’s subversive critique and questioning of the sub-Saharan African experience in the broader Spanish imperial context. Although rarely spoken of, I highlight for my audience in this presentation that there is no shortage of black characters with whom Cervantes contends. In his complete works, the cultural, linguistic, and racial Blackness of Cervantes's Black subjects do, in fact, matter, thus forcing us to reconsider in what sense their lives possess an inherent value within the author’s cultural purview and literary corpus. To that effect, as I argue in this paper, we can and should see in Cervantes an ally in the struggle for and defense of marginalized voices. But when doing so, we should neither forget the voices of his African-descended figures nor the voices of those today who demand justice with a can of spray paint in hand.

Nick Jones's research agenda explores the agency, subjectivity, and performance of Black diasporic identities in early modern Iberia and the Ibero-Atlantic world. In doing so, his work enlists the strategies, methodologies, and insights of Black Studies into the service of Early Modern Studies and vice versa. To that end, Jones's scholarly and teaching interests re-imagine the lives of early African diasporic people via the global circulation of material goods, visual culture, and ideological forms represented in archival documents and literature from West-Central Africa, Iberia, and the Americas. He is the author of Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (Penn State UP, May 2019) and co-editor of Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology (Palgrave-MacMillan, December 2018) with Cassander L. Smith and Miles P. Grier. Currently, he's at work on a new book that examines the role of material culture in the cultural and literary production of Black women in early modern Iberia. Follow Jones on Twitter @Bibliophilenick.

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