“A crucial intervention in discussions about black Africans in Renaissance Europe. Focusing specifically on early modern Spain, Jones offers insightful and nuanced readings of the ways in which (mostly) white Spanish writers appropriated black speech in staged performances and poetry, arguing that such appropriations actually encode black African agency. Importantly, he decenters the author and asks readers to approach these literary forms from the margin to understand how forces beyond the author influence text formation. Jones’s careful, against-the-grain readings open up to readers new archives (and re-present familiar ones from fresh, intriguing perspectives) for the study of black cultural experiences in the Renaissance era.”
—Cassander L. Smith, author of Black Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic World
“Jones’s innovative comparative work makes space for dramatic resistance and plurality in our telling of imperial histories.”
—Margaret E. Boyle, Public Books
“Jones encourages us to conceive of the performance and reception of habla de negros on stages as particular historical sites. Jones’s richly textured descriptions of these visual and aural feasts of Blackness will indubitably spark an important wave of scholarship that focuses on the aural landscape of habla de negros on and off stages in early modern Spain.”
—Chloe Ireton, H-Black Europe
“Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain is an ambitious monograph that examines the presence of the African diaspora in the Iberian Peninsula through the ‘radical performance’ of black speech, revealing a series of social, cultural and linguistic complexities that until now remained hidden due to the unfounded prejudices of more traditional criticism.”
—Victor Sierra Matute, Caliope
“Nicholas Jones makes a necessary and nuanced argument that black folks will always hack the systems of oppression and eagerly make use of whatever agency they can acquire to subvert and chip away at anti-blackness. Jones uses the theories of Audre Lorde, Zora Neale Hurston, and Daphne Brooks to demonstrate how heretofore undertheorized characters in habla de negros texts revel in black joy through artful expressions and speech acts steeped in an Africaneity that Iberian Studies can no longer deny.”
—Kinitra D. Brooks, author of Searching for Sycorax: Black Women’s Hauntings of Contemporary Horror
“Nicholas R. Jones reveals new worlds in this exploration of the black African diaspora in early modern Iberia. Deftly combining literary analysis, performance studies, and diaspora studies, Jones demonstrates how representations of ‘black speech’ document African voices of agency, presence, and resistance as African identities were boldly formed at the heart of Iberian culture. These lively and critically imaginative arguments are destined to become standard points of reference for years to come.”
—Josiah Blackmore, author of Moorings: Portuguese Expansion and the Writing of Africa
“Staging Habla de Negros manages to create a perfect balance between an exhaustive literary analysis informed by cultural studies and black studies and a short study that connects the past with the present, highlighting the transhistorical and transnational aspects of the staging of the black race, aspects still subordinate to other interests in Golden Age studies.”
—Esther Fernández, Hispania
“A bold intervention that contributes significantly to the ongoing expansion of early modern race studies beyond the Anglosphere.”
—Noémie Ndiaye, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies
“This compelling study offers many fresh insights into the literary reception of African-Iberian speech performance and recovers depictions that previous scholarship derided as hopelessly biased or monologic. It utilizes these depictions to read not just the formation of early modern black subjectivities but also the role they played in defining the hegemonic order under which these were crafted and codified. Jones directs critical attention to multiple stagings of subaltern performance by Blacks, Africans, and Ibero-Africans as well as their instrumental roles in the formation of early modern global empires.”
—Israel Burshatin, Haverford College
“By showing how literary representations can illuminate not only the anti-black racism of white authors and audiences but also the impact and agency of black subjects in the African diaspora, Jones’s book offers an innovative framework and plants the seeds for further research on the Iberian world, demonstrating how much this field can contribute to early modern critical race studies.”
—Lisa Voigt, Colonial Latin American Review
