Guest Editor Introduction: On Recovery and Reparation

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• Guest Editor IntroductionOn Recovery and Reparation
• Nicholas R. Jones

FOLLOWING IN THE TRADITION of ethnologist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, I have always been keenly aware of and compelled by—perhaps blindly, to a fault—the richness of black culture and its materiality, speech acts, and verve. Hurston comments on this in her oft-cited essay "Characteristics of Negro Expression" (1934). She teaches us that "every phase of Negro life is highly dramatized … everything is acted out" (830). Like Hurston, I, too, wanted to—and continue to still—preserve blackness in its beauty, spectacularism, vibrancy, and wholeness. Such an act to preserve blackness in its complexity, humanity, and vitality foments the work of recovery and reparation characterized by this double special issue Recovering Black Performance in Early Modern Iberia.

The vision and work carried out in this double special issue draws on over two decades of my biographic, humanistic, political, and scholarly commitment to centering sub-Saharan and diasporic African blackness in early modern Iberian Studies. Quiet as it is kept, at the onset of my formative days as an undergraduate student at Haverford College (2001–05) and a PhD candidate at New York University (2005–13), I have always toiled and troubled—fighting tooth-and-nail—over creating and developing interdisciplinary methodologies that render legible and visible the legitimacy of recovering black agency, black resistance, and black subjectivity through the prisms of embodied, materialized, and performative blackness. A handful of colleagues and peers dismissed, discouraged, and scoffed at my ideas for taking up such interpretive strategies and scholarly pursuits. Undeterred by the challenge, I came to realize that, in order to shatter the unspoken structural glass ceiling edified and erected within publishing venues—that both catapult and protect discourses of literary criticism and thought in early modern Iberian Studies, most notably amongst Hispanists working across all literary genres—I had to institute my own alternative and radical ways of approaching criticism and history. While writing my doctoral dissertation, "Hyperbolic Hybridities: Habla de Negros and the Economies of Race and Language in Early Modern Spanish Poetry and Theater," I began to learn to jettison and marshal my own unique reading-against-the-grain critical approach and methodology. In doing so, that dissertation—and the constellation of scholarly and public-facing work volleyed from it—set a precedent that would intervene in the status quo apparatus of reading blackness uncritically and unimaginatively—yet willingly so—through the valences of abjection, buffoonery, deracination, stereotype, and subjection. Freudian- and Hegelian-like, blackness in the field in which I hold a PhD toggled the "totem and taboo" and occupied the extraterrestrial critical topology of ahistoricity. I emend and suspend the ideas framing my opening [End Page 7] remarks here, as I'll return to them more fully in my new single-authored book Cervantine Blackness. Forthcoming in the fall of 2024, Cervantine Blackness theorizes about and unpacks the implications of projects that seek to recover archives, lives, and stories featuring black people across Iberian early modernity.

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The content and subject matter of this double special issue—consisting of twelve full-length scholarly articles and four punchy think-pieces, purposefully titled Recovering Black Performance in Early Modern Iberia—would have been inconceivable, if not heretical, some twenty or more years ago. This project, whose genesis derived from a dynamic, international two-day colloquium—funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and hosted at Yale University on 29–30 April 2022—is truly a first of its kind. Both the symposium and the double special issue will not only spark new methods for studying black people and black communities on early Iberian stages but will also invigorate theoretical conceptualizations of blackness. Hosting the conference at Yale University—in New Haven, Connecticut, yet also well connected to the Boston and New York metropolitan areas—allowed us to spare no effort to welcome members of black and brown communities to the event. We made this space accessible to audiences beyond the academic sphere, simultaneously giving a high priority to participation by graduate students who could be inspired to plan research on questions of black performance in global Iberia.

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