Rethinking the African Influence in Early Modern Iberia: Get to Know New Faculty Member Nicholas Jones (Spanish & Portuguese Dept)

Although the presence of Black people from Sub-Saharan Africa in Iberia has not been broadly studied and sometimes even overlooked, the African diaspora has had great relevance in the Peninsula since the Islamic occupation during the Middle Ages. Professor Nicholas R. Jones studies African diasporic culture and representation in Iberia, offering new ways of reading and understanding Blackness in Early Modern Spanish literature.

Originally from Seattle, Washington, Dr. Jones holds a B.A. from Harvard University and a PhD from New York University. Prior to becoming an Assistant Professor at Yale’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese, he held the position of Assistant Professor at UC Davis. Dr. Jones has also been a visiting Professor at Georgetown University and New York University, and his research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. He is the author of Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (Penn State University Press, May 2019) and co-editor of Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology (Palgrave, December 2018) and Pornographic Sensibilities: Imagining Sex and the Visceral in Premodern and Early Modern Spanish Cultural Production (Routledge, January 2021).

Professor Nicholas Jones’ interest in Black representation in Early Modern studies began when he traveled to Seville, Spain on an exchange program in High School when his Spring Break fortuitously overlapped with Semana Santa in April. While at Harvard, Dr. Jones was also able to study abroad, centering his work on research projects surrounding his interest in Black lives and communities.

Although he identifies as an Iberianist, he has also published work focusing on Black Latin American studies, including the lyricism of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and, most recently, has been interested in Cuban studies, both Early Modern and Contemporary.  In this way, his work highlights the importance of also thinking trans-oceanically: “Thinking about oceans is very important as far as how bodies, products, objects and ideas were moved and were transported willingly or not across these Empires. So I would say that’s very important,” he notes.

As Professor Jones states in a recent publication, he seeks to reimagine the lives of the first people of the African diaspora through the global circulation of material goods, visual culture, and ideological valences represented in archival documents and literature from West-Central Africa, Iberia, and the Americas. Through the analysis of material culture, he accounts for the presence of Sub-Saharan African people in the Iberian Peninsula. He rejects the misconception that the enslavement and subordination of Black Africans in the Early Modern Iberian world stripped these communities of their culture and heritage:

“In my work, I really like to be nuanced and careful and not conflate or flatten Black experiences. Then what draws me to the Iberian Peninsula especially in the 15th, 16th and 17th century is precisely the different types of gaps, glitches, contradictions and paradoxes that both literary texts and historical documents present and offer us. In those periods Blackness is paradoxical, in the sense that since that one minute one may assume or think that a type of Black experience was a certain way or oftentimes people would assume that it was bad and everyone was enslaved. But that’s not always the case. We have to be very careful about the seduction of and our inclination to connect and talk about the existence and life of Africans and African-descended people through slavery. As far as I’m concerned, even with these very early contacts and encounters with Early Modern Iberians and Early Modern Sub-saharan Africans, it was not always about subjugation or enslavement. That happened, of course, but there were also other instances in which that was not the case.”

His first book Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain, which was originally his Ph.D dissertation, won the Outstanding First Book Prize from the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora and the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize from the Modern Language Association.

In the Preface, he explains how he got interested in the representation of Black people in Spain’s Golden Age:

“In countless occasions where I would be present in an all-Spanish-language work setting, and those in the same space would refuse to speak to me in Spanish, yet when a nonblack person would enter that all-Spanish-language space, their Whiteness (or, perhaps, their perceived “mixed”-racedness)—physically and visually—somehow would inaugurate a bilingual moment where the native Spanish speaker would willingly converse in Spanish with the “white gringo” Other while speaking to me, the perceived “dark negrito” Other, in English. In summation, these personal anecdotes, despite the anger and pain they have caused me over the years, illustrate only but a few personal experiences that have compelled me to write this book on early modern literary habla de negros” (xii).

The book subverts the idea that white appropriations and representations of habla de negros (black speech)  is ‘racist buffoonery’ or ‘racist stereotype’, focusing on the agency and resistance of black Africans in Early Modern Spain. Professor Jones explains that he used a performance theory approach that challenged “the function, materiality, performance, and presence of black Africans’ bodily, sartorial, and linguistic Blackness in early modern Spanish cultural and literary studies” (xiii). As the author states, he felt that the literary depictions of habla de negros analyzed in his book had to be theorized “because there has been a lack of analysis due to racialized value systems of artistic expression”.

Dr. Jones asks questions and thinks to counteract or complicate conventional traditional approaches in narratives about black people in Early Modern Spain that always focused on stereotypes: “I was asking about representations of Blackness in Early Modern Spanish literary texts, I wanted to write a book and do something that essentially troubled and destabilized and counter disagreed with what the established tradition and established scholars had always said”. The book was not only very well received but it also won various awards, which, as he states, “catapulted my career in really unexpected, rich, phenomenal ways”.

Professor Jones seeks to reimagine the lives of the first people of the African diaspora through the global circulation of material goods, visual culture, and ideological valences represented in archival documents and literature from West-Central Africa, Iberia, and the Americas. 

He is currently finishing his second solo book, Cervantine blackness, a project that, like his previous one, analyzes Blackness in Early Modern Iberia. However, he states that his research interests are now closer to historical and theoretical texts:

In Staging Habla de Negros I was more concerned with showing that these not only black literary characters but also black people living in Early Modern Spain and Portugal were thinking subjects, had agency, they spoke back and defended themselves, protected themselves and others from the violence of white supremacy and slavery. But I think now, especially in this book, it’s more about my scholarly evolution. There are moments in the book in which I say very candidly that the ideas and positions that I held in Staging Habla de Negros… I’m just not there anymore. I’ve moved on from making the final conclusion the existence of black people, communities and lives just solely about agency. I think there is much more.

Jones explains that Cervantine blackness pushes back against the theoretical problems, the political ideological maneuvers that construct one’s belief about agency. Instead, it is more about the state of the field, the state of literary studies and cultural studies. He is currently in Spain doing archival research and looking at documentation about black women in Spain and Portugal.

Professor Jones is still deeply interested in Blackness in Early Modern Iberia. However, his work is moving in a less literary and more historical direction which focuses on forms and representation of queerness and transness. Speech acts, forms of identification, performance, are some of the many elements that are at the center of his interests and that continue to nourish his research work today.

By Katherina Frangi, Graduate Student Assistant, katherina.frangi@yale.edu