Sonidos Negros: On the Blackness of Flamenco"Sonidos Negros traces how, in the span between 1492--the year in which Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula coincided with Christopher Columbus's landing on Hispaniola--and 1933--when Andalusian poet Federico García Lorca published his 'Theory and Play of the Duende'--the Moor became Black, and how the imagined Gitano ("Gypsy," or Roma) embodies the warring images and sounds of this process. By the nineteenth-century nadir of its colonial reach, Spanish identity came to be enacted in terms of a minstrelized Gitano, a hybrid of American and Spanish representations of Blackness. The imagined Gypsy about which flamenco imagery turns dances on a knife's edge delineating Black and White worlds. Teetering between ostentatious and damning confusion and the humility of epiphany, this figure relates to an earlier Spanish trope: the pastor bobo (foolish shepherd), who, seeing an angelic apparition, must decide whether to accept the light of Christ--or remain in darkness. Spain's symbolic linkage of this religious peril with the Blackness of enslavement constitutes the evangelical narrative which vanquished the Moors and enslaved the Americas, an ideological framework that would be deployed by all the colonial slaving powers. The bobo's precarious state of confusion, appealingly comic but also holding the pathos of the ultimate stakes of his decision--heaven or hell, safety or extermination--opens up a teeming view of the embodied politics of colonial exploitation and creole identity formation. Flamenco's Sonidos Negros live in this eternal moment of bulla, the confusion and ruckus that protect embodied resistance to subjugation, the lament for what has been lost, and the values and aspirations of those rendered imperceptible by enslavement and colonization"-- |
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African American Andalucía Andalusian Antonio audience baile ballet blackface blackface minstrelsy Blas Vega bobo's body bolero Brooks bullfight Cádiz cafés cantantes canario Caniyitas cante century Chocolat chuchumbé circus cites clown colonial comic Cotarelo cultural cumbé Dan Emmett dancers danza early modern eighteenth-century enslaved entremés Entremeses España española Esquivel European exotic fandango Fauser Felipe Figure film flamenco footwork French García Gitano Goldberg Granada guaracha Gypsies Historia jácara Jacinto Padilla Jaleo Jerez Jim Crow John Durang José Juan Juana jumps Luis Lumière Macarrona Madrid Málaga Manuel María Martínez Massine Meric México música Musical Encounters Nathan Negro Meri nineteenth-century Ortiz Otero panaderos pantomime Parakilas Pardo Bazán Paris pastor bobo Pellicer performance popular Pougin Quevedo race racial Roma Ruffian Sevilla Siglo de Oro sing slave song Sonidos Negros Spain Spanish dance stage tangos teatro theater tonadilla Tratado Triana University Press Villancico de Negros villancicos villano writes York YouTube zapateado zapatetas