How is the politics of Blackness figured in the flamenco dancing body? What does flamenco dance tell us about the construction of race in the Atlantic world? Sonidos Negros traces how, between 1492—when Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula coincided with Christopher Columbus’s landing on Hispaniola—and 1933—when Andalusian poet Federico García Lorca published his “Theory and Play of the Duende”—the vanquished Moor became Black; and how the imagined Gitano (“Gypsy,” or Roma) embodies the warring images and sounds of this process. By the nineteenth-century nadir of its colonial reach, Spanish identity was paradoxically enacted in terms of a minstrelized Gitano, a hybrid of Spanish and American representations of Blackness. Flamenco’s imagined Gypsy, teetering between ostentatious ignorance and the humility of epiphany, references an earlier trope: the pastor bobo (foolish shepherd), who, seeing an angelic apparition, must decide whether to accept the light of Christ—or remain in darkness. Spain’s symbolic linkage of this religious peril with the Blackness of abjection scripts the evangelical narrative which defeated the Moors and enslaved the Americas. The bobo’s confusion, appealingly comic but holding the pathos of the ultimate stakes of his decision—heaven or hell, safety or extermination—bares a teeming view of the embodied politics of colonial exploitation and creole identity formation. Flamenco’s Sonidos Negros live in this precarious balance, amid the purposeful ruckus cloaking danced resistance, the lament for what has been lost, and the values and aspirations of those rendered imperceptible by slavery and colonization.
