Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race by Noémie Ndiaye (review)

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• Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race by Noémie Ndiaye
• Baltasar Fra-Molinero (bio)

Noémie Ndiaye. Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. 358 pp. + 12 color plates. Hardcover and e-book $64.95, paperback $24.95.

Scripts of Blackness puts English, French, and Spanish early modern literatures in conversation with each other. Its comparatist method showcases the history of the African diaspora in each country's colonial development. Noémie Ndiaye explores what she calls "the invention of performative blackness" (6) in early modern Europe by paying attention to archival material of words and images that reveals a common narrative: blackness becomes transnational and intercolonial, as she calls it. Early modern slavery itself was the first transnational institution in the Atlantic world, and blackness was its embodiment.

The introductory chapter analyzes the lexicogical commonalities of the word race in English, Spanish and French. Early modern dictionaries and vocabularies show how the word moved from meaning social degree and religious adscription to add distinction of people by phenotype. Blackness became a race, a visible marker of pre-established difference that justifies domination. The chapter then establishes the genesis of performative blackness in the Iberian Peninsula, where the main cities of Spain and Portugal contained the largest communities of black Africans. Literary texts as early as the fifteenth century give evidence of the creation of a canon to represent blackness that includes speech, music, and dance. The introduction also explores research methodologies that justify the study of black representations in countries where there was no significant black population (France, England) but where there was a growing interest in representing blackness, especially in the form of dancing among aristocrats in what the author sees as early examples of colonial fantasies. Representing blackness in court balls expressed a desire for trans-Atlantic empire. The representation of blackness by whites was staged as spectacle and as a mainstay of white supremacy. The author addresses the need to study these processes, as today white supremacy and anti-Black racism are a global pandemic and a threat to humanity. Scripts of Blackness establishes historical distinctions in the various processes by which representations of blackness came into being. With the onset of the Atlantic slave trade, blackness became a performance in early modern European courts. Racial impersonation took the form of black-up (created after make-up, cosmetic blackness), blackspeak (acoustic blackness) and dance (kinetic blackness). Other theoretical concepts are added in the analysis of black performance, including racecraft, which encompasses all forms of black performance; and Africanese, or the use of incomprehensible gibberish to indicate foreign blackness. Such concepts allow the reader to navigate with a common theoretical language the [End Page 292] performative cultures of Spain, France, and England from the sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth century.

Chapter 1's recounting of the evolution of devil images into objects of consumption in Spain—and how this process informed the development of the slave trade—is accompanied by overwhelming textual evidence. Meanwhile, early modern French and English cultural practices continued the medieval association of blackness to religious negativity. The chapter historicizes the differences between the three countries as their relation to trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism followed different temporal spans. It also demonstrates that scripts of blackness circulated between the three countries.

Black-up or cosmetic blackness is explored in chapter 2 through the irrepresentability of female blackness, that is, the impossibility of articulating Black women's rape and their labor, which receives a novel treatment under the rubric of oblique aesthetics. This aesthetic scripted Afro-diasporic women into a performative invisibility that absconds white desire and widespread rape in the colonies. The purpose of the chapter is to render Afro-diasporic women visible in the very performative texts that exclude them. The chapter analyzes three different types of black script by displaying an impressive array of scholarship on palace ballet dances in France. The exclusion of Black women from the geometric dance represents a disavowal of white desire for them. The other important point in this chapter is the exclusionary take on the...