Overview

'Black but Human' is the first study to focus on the visual representations of African slaves and ex-slaves in Spain during the Hapsburg dynasty. The Afro-Hispanic proverb 'Black but Human' is the main thread of the six chapters and serves as a lens through which to explore the ways in which a certain visual representation of slavery both embodies and reproduces hegemonic visions of enslaved and liberated Africans, and at the same time provides material for critical and emancipatory practices by Afro-Hispanics themselves. The African presence in the Iberian Peninsula between the late fifteenth century and the end of the seventeenth century was as a result of the institutionalization of the local and transatlantic slave trades. In addition to the Moors, Berbers, and Turks born as slaves, there were approximately two million enslaved people in the kingdoms of Castile, Aragón, and Portugal. The 'Black but Human' topos that emerges from the African work songs and poems written by Afro-Hispanics encodes the multi-layered processes through which a black emancipatory subject emerges and a 'black nation' forges a collective resistance. It is visually articulated by Afro-Hispanic and Spanish artists in religious paintings and in the genres of self-portraiture and portraiture. This extraordinary imagery coexists with the stereotypical representations of African slaves and ex-slaves by Spanish sculptors, engravers, jewellers, and painters mainly in the religious visual form and by European draftsmen and miniaturists, in their landscape drawings, and sketches for costume books.

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9780198881063

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The visual and textual evidence that it assembles will be of substantial interest to those who study the history of race and colour in visual culture, and its original framing opens the way to those who will wish to take its arguments further. * Pamela A. Patton, Princeton University, New Jersey * Fracchia's groundbreaking book, rich in untapped archival sources, lays a foundation for a new understanding of racial blackness and its representation in the Iberian-Atlantic world. Fracchia integrates diasporic African cultural production and its reception with unprecedented depth and clarity - essential reading for anyone interested in race, aesthetics, art history, cultural studies, Atlantic history, and black studies. * Jesse McCarthy, Harvard University * Fracchia gives the voice and the views of the enslaved unlike any book on art from the period I have read, specifically she builds on the conventional academic scholarship of Victor Stoicha's chapter in Image of the Black in Western Art, she gives expression and humanity to the black enslaved, as well as consistently recognising slavery as a crime against humanity - sympathetically considering the enslaved and ex-enslaved Afro-Hispanics. I whole heartedly recommended this book, unreservedly. * Michael Ohajuru, School of Advanced Study, University of London * A wonderful, scholarly, imaginative and necessary work [...] It profoundly develops our understanding of the semiotic construction of the black body [...] The work on the miracle of the black leg is extraordinary. [...] It has finally done justice to Velazquez, Juan de Pareja [...] This book has made available a hitherto neglected mini archive within the study of the visual cultures generated by Atlantic slavery. * Marcus Wood, University of Sussex * 'Black but Human' will be a key reference for scholars and students alike, pointing the way toward future studies on the central place of African and Afro-descendant women and men in shaping the visual and material cultures of early modern Iberia. * Tanya J. Tiffany, Bulletin of the Comediantes * On the whole, this book is an invaluable point of departure for students and scholars interested in a history of early modern Spanish art that reinserts the slave trade as a central factor in Habsburg Spanish economic, artistic, and religious development. One of the most successful aspects of 'Black but Human' is the way Fracchia implicitly asserts that representations of slavery are not a secondary, parallel, or subsection of the history of Habsburg Spanish visual culture, but are importantly embedded within and central to the arc of that history. * Caitlin Irene Dimartino, Comitatus * The strength of this book lies in its tour-de-force discussion of visual representations of Black Africans in Hapsburg Spain, culminating in a rich catalogue of fifty-eight images. * Chloe L. Ireton, English Historical Review *

Author Information

Carmen Fracchia is Professor of Hispanic Art History at Birkbeck, University of London. Her work focusses on Hispanic intellectual, political, and religious thought about local Spanish and transatlantic slavery, freedom, subjectivity, and hybridity and their articulations in the visual form during the Hapsburg dynasty.

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