Bulletin of the Comediantes

THIS VOLUME brings together a diverse group of scholars both in terms of their rank and in terms of their disciplinary orientation: independent researchers, assistant professors, associate professors, and full professors, as well as historians, literary critics, anthropologists, and other scholars engaged in performance studies or cultural studies. Their basic objective is to center the experiences of Black folk in the early modern period to show just how integral they were in shaping Western culture, even as they built their own. From this transdisciplinary standpoint, these authors propose to “interrupt” (4) the epistemological borders and canonical cornerstones that have traditionally defined their individual disciplines in relation to Western academic culture writ large. They also aim to draw upon the provable historical depth of Black studies to simultaneously confront and combine with early modern studies and thereby produce a new complex potentially called early modern Black diaspora studies. The initiative would integrate Black Africans and their descendants “as thinking, human, agentive presences” (4) into the whole, thereby reimagining received givens with promising new grounds for analysis.

Stretching across a historical span that reaches back to 1441 and the early Portuguese maritime outthrust, the book’s chapters study exploration and settlement; Renaissance Europe; the slave trade; life and culture in the Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British colonies; and the metropoles themselves. Much of the analysis builds on the critical platform addressing these topics established by such scholars as Lemuel Johnson, Martha K. Cobb, Miriam DeCosta-Willis, A.C de C.M. Saunders, Baltasar Fra-Molinero, Kate Lowe, John Beusterien, Jerome Branche, Joy McKnight, and James Sidbury, who themselves drew upon, in varying degrees, postcolonial perspectives and critical race theory. The book has an introduction followed by twelve chapters, divided into four parts: Part 1, “Space and Field,” part 2, “Archives and Methods,” part 3, “Period Tensions,” and part 4, “Early Modern Black Lives Matter: A Critical Roundtable,” in the form of a discussion that allows for four contributors to respond to each other’s essays and to the book’s larger concerns. [End Page 135]

After the introduction, the chapters themselves range from Gabriel de Avilez Rocha’s defense of maroonage as agency based on the testimony of two sixteenth-century fugitives from slavery; Esther J. Therry’s vindication of the Moresco Kongo dance form in terms of its role in the evolution of European court ballet; Ashley Willard’s reassessment of the potential of the voicing and the vernacular of the enslaved in the provision of a fuller historical account of the socio-racial dynamic in colonial life; Cassander L. Smith’s centering of the persona of Candy, the other non-White woman (along with Tituba), scapegoated in the infamous Salem witch trials, to show how the rhetoric around her case contributed to the evolving racialized binary of good and evil; David Sterling Brown’s uncovering of crude anti-Black violence in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1594), as precedent, again, to contemporary iterations of the adultification and immolation of Black youth; Lauren Shook’s critique of the rhetoric of white racial supremacy in US settler Christianity of late-1600s Virginia in Toni Morrison’s novel A Mercy (2008); to Rebecca Kumar’s rereading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1601) casting light on the homoerotics of colonial domination and making a call for a more nuanced accounting of colonial resistance. The roundtable, encompassing chapters 10–13, present more of a dialogue among the interlocutors, as the first one points out the “phenomenology of whiteness” that comes through in Spanish Golden Age theater, while the second one holds up for critique the myth of “tolerance, convivencia (and) multicultural coexistence” (214) that purported to explain the Muslim and Jewish historical presence in the early modern Spain, even as an accompanying notion of white (European) purity was proffered as the defining racial ethos of the nation. In chapters 12 and 13, an analogy is established between...