Overview

There is no shortage of Black characters in Miguel de Cervantes’s works, yet there has been a profound silence about the Spanish author’s compelling literary construction and cultural codification of Black Africans and sub-Saharan Africa. In Cervantine Blackness, Nicholas R. Jones reconsiders in what sense Black subjects possess an inherent value within Cervantes’s cultural purview and literary corpus. In this unflinching critique, Jones charts important new methodological and theoretical terrain, problematizing the ways emphasis on agency has stifled and truncated the study of Black Africans and their descendants in early modern Spanish cultural and literary production. Through the lens of what he calls “Cervantine Blackness,” Jones challenges the reader to think about the blind faith that has been lent to the idea of agency—and its analogues “presence” and “resistance”—as a primary motivation for examining the lives of Black people during this period. Offering a well-crafted and sharp critique, through a systematic deconstruction of deeply rooted prejudices, Jones establishes a solid foundation for the development of a new genre of literary and cultural criticism. 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.

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9780271098777

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Reviews

“Cervantine Blackness dazzles: a fearless second book that invokes Black studies to explode its disciplinary paradigms. This book interrogates the complex archival and transhistorical roles that Blackness, Black people, and Black scholars navigate, refusing the easy legibility of the frameworks of agency versus oppression. Nicholas R. Jones’s searing indictment of early modern Iberian studies bursts forth from the confines of his previous scholarly skin much like the serpentine imagery that propels his reevaluation of the Cervantine.” —Xine Yao,author of Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America “Cervantine Blackness is an exceptional example of how literary analysis, history, philology, and critical race theory can be perfectly integrated to offer new perspectives on early modern Iberian blackness. Jones provides fresh and innovative insights and contributions that are sure to inform and shape future research and scholarship in the field.” —Victor Sierra Matute, Baruch College, CUNY “Cervantine Blackness is a homily. Jones forces readers to reckon with the perils of frameworks that flatten Black people into caricatures that appease white imperial and slaveocratic sensibilities. The good news is Jones does not leave us despondent. Incorporating the dynamism of critical Black studies into Cervantine studies, Jones offers theories of Blackness that makes room for characters to move in undulating complexity. This book is an edifying sermon for honest, diligent, and creative thinkers.” —Todne Thomas,author of Kincraft: The Making of Black Evangelical Sociality

“Cervantine Blackness is an exceptional example of how literary analysis, history, philology, and critical race theory can be perfectly integrated to offer new perspectives on early modern Iberian blackness. Jones provides fresh and innovative insights and contributions that are sure to inform and shape future research and scholarship in the field.” —Victor Sierra Matute,CUNY

Author Information

Nicholas R. Jones is Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. He is the author of the prize-winning Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain, also published by Penn State University Press, and coeditor of Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology and Pornographic Sensibilities: Imagining Sex and the Visceral in Premodern and Early Modern Spanish Cultural Production.

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