RSVP

This book launch roundtable is an exploration into the depths of Miguel de Cervantes’s portrayal of Black Africans and sub-Saharan Africa, through a dialogue with Nicholas R. Jones’s latest scholarly work, Cervantine Blackness (Penn State UP, 2024). Nicholas R. Jones, known for his multi-awarded book Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain, which has significantly transformed the discourse on Blackness within early modern Iberian and broader Hispanic studies, will serve as the respondent. With Cervantine Blackness, Jones challenges entrenched paradigms and inviting a reevaluation of the complexities surrounding Black identities in Cervantes’s literary corpus. By recalibrating the focus from conventional narratives of “agency” and “resistance” to a nuanced understanding of Black subjects within Cervantes’s works, Jones sets the stage for a roundtable discussion that is anticipated to be transformative. Through systematic deconstruction of long-standing prejudices, this dialogue seeks to forge new paths in literary and cultural criticism, challenging the participants and audience alike to rethink the portrayal of Blackness in early modern literature and, more importantly, its implications for contemporary discourse.

Participants:

• Eva María Copeland (Dickinson College)
• David Sterling Brown (Trinity College)
• Monica Styles (Howard University)
• Aurélie Vialette (Yale University)
• Emily Wilbourne (Graduate Center/Queens C, CUNY)

Introduction: Giorgina Dopico (NYU)
Respondent: Nicholas R. Jones (Yale U)
Moderated by: Víctor Sierra Matute (Baruch, CUNY)

BIOS

Eva María Copeland is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Dickinson College. Her research and teaching focus on questions of race, sexuality, gender, and national identity in the cultural production of 19th-21st century Spain with a postcolonial and transatlantic emphasis. Her essays have appeared in journals such as Hispanic Review, Bulletin of Spanish Studies and Revista de Estudios de Género y Sexualidades. Her article “On Blackness and Belonging in Contemporary Spain: Desirée Bela-Lobedde’s Ser mujer negra en España” was the recipient of the 2023 American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP) Outstanding Scholarly Publication Award.

Dr. David Sterling Brown—a proud NYU Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumnus—is a tenured Associate Professor of English at his undergrad alma mater Trinity College (Connecticut), where is also serving as a DEI Faculty Fellow and a Community Learning Faculty Fellow this academic year. He is the author of Shakespeare’s White Others (Cambridge University Press 2023), which was acquired by Tantor Media and recorded as an audiobook, with Brown as narrator. He has published numerous peer-reviewed and public-facing essays and delivered myriad talks. Brown is also an editor and public speaker. In 2021, he received a prestigious Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society Fellowship that facilitated his residency with NYU professor and poet Claudia Rankine’s The Racial Imaginary Institute, of which he remains a full-time Curatorial Team member. The Fellowship also led to the development of his professional website and his virtual-reality art gallery and exhibition—“Visualizing Race Virtually”—that complements Shakespeare’s White Others. His second book, Shakespeare Under the Hood, is under contract with Cambridge University Press.

Monica Styles is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Howard University. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Recuperating Black Perspectives from the Early Modern Caribbean under contract at Vanderbilt University Press in which she seeks to recovering and interpreting the contributions of people of African descent to early modern literary culture by reading against the canonical void. She theorizes Afro-Intertextuality to recenter Afro-descendant influenced cultural production by bringing together Afro-centrism and intertextuality to reconstruct Black subalternity depicted in speech acts, writing and corporeality. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Hispania and The Afro-Hispanic Review.

Aurélie Vialette is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. Her research areas are working-class culture, popular music, social movements, gender studies, prison reform, slavery networks, and disability studies. She has published Intellectual Philanthropy: The Seduction of the Masses (2018), recipient of the 2019 North American Catalan Society book award; Dissonances of Modernity: Music, Text, and Performance in Modern Spain (co-edited with Irene Gómez-Catellanos) in 2021; and The Legacies of Slavery in Modern Iberia (co-edited with Akiko Tsuchiya), forthcoming 2025. She is working on a book manuscript on penal colonies in the southern Philippines titled The Trial Run: Gender, Disability and Penal Colonies in the Philippines in the 19th Century, to be published at Cornell UP. She is the managing editor of Catalan Review.

Emily Wilbourne is Professor of Music and Global Early Modern Studies at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. She specializes in Italian theatrical music and sound during the seventeenth century, and in questions of embodiment, performance, race, gender, and sexuality. She is the author of several books: Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell’Arte (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Lesbian/Opera: Elena Kats-Chernin’s Iphis and Matricide: The Musical (Lyrebird Press, 2022), and Voice, Slavery, and Race in Seventeenth-Century Florence (Oxford University Press, 2023); a collection of essays, co-edited with Suzanne G. Cusick, Acoustemologies in Contact: Sounding Subjects and Modes of Listening in Early Modernity (Open Book Press, 2021) is available via open access. Dr. Wilbourne’s articles have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Women & Music, Recercare, Teatro e storia, Italian Studies, Echo, and Workplace, as well as in several Oxford Handbooks.

Nicholas R. Jones is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Yale University and the former King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center’s Scholar-in-Residence at New York University (2021-2022). He is the author of the prize-winning 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) with Chad Leahy. Jones also co-edits The Routledge Critical Junctures in Global Early Modernities book series with Derrick Higginbotham. Jones’s research has been generously supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as has held visiting professorships at Georgetown University and New York University.