White Faces, Black Masks: The Racial Shimmer of Morisco and Sub-Saharan Slaveries in Lope de Vega's Los melindres de Belisa

Abstract:

This essay examines how Lope de Vega's Los melindres de Belisa, a comedia urbana composed circa 1608, represents the intersection of different types of slavery in Habsburg Spain. This play is especially pertinent to these questions as its composition coincided with the intense debates that culminated in Philip III's Order of the Expulsion of the Moriscos from the Iberian Peninsula (1609), a time when sub-Saharan slavery was also firmly established in peninsular Spain. Lope de Vega's comic genius yields a rich dramatic canvas for exploring how racialized representations of enslaved Moriscos and sub-Saharan peoples intersect and interpellate one another in Spanish public theater. An analysis of racial imagery and plot twists in Los melindres de Belisa shows that even though early modern Spanish discourse often strategically essentialized differences between Black sub-Saharan Africans and Moriscos, the racial shimmer in Lope's representations of slavery discloses that these categories were fundamentally entangled with, and indeed, constructed one another.