Good Shepherd, Bumpkin Shepherd

In Christmas pageants staged throughout the Spanish Empire, the pastor bobo (foolish shepherd) asked rude and impertinent questions, making Christian doctrine comprehensible to the humblest audiences. The bobo’s comic confusion—Will he or won’t he see the light of Christ?—was danced with obscene gambols and cacophonous footwork, manifesting the perilous invisible stain of impure blood. Yet these sharp-tongued dramatizations of redemption simultaneously undermined the determinative dogma of blood purity which governed Spanish society. Aristocrats thus asserted their status, enacting the post-epiphany bobo by refining transgressive gambols into virtuosic caprioles. Ironically, eighteenth-century Spaniards adopted the imaginary Gitano—an outlaw Other which inherits the bobo’s dramatic narrative of redemption—as a national symbol. Spain’s identification with this figure, often described euphemistically as a proto-romantic “orientalization,” is in fact a racialized downgrade. With the advent of the fandango, Spain, reduced to performing itself for tourists, came to dance Blackness for Europe.

Tilting across the Racial Divide

Andalusian Gitanophilia, like its forebear majismo, paradoxically asserted wealth, culture, and liberal democratic values. Flamenco’s mid-nineteenth century emergence can therefore be read as responding to U.S. blackface minstrelsy, enacting affiliation with the structures of colonial power. The Spanish bobo’s narrative of transcendence thus weaves through the very flamenco story of Jacinto Padilla, “El Negro Meri,” a black man, and the first recorded male flamenco artist, filmed in 1900 Paris. Long forgotten, Padilla had a colorful career as an equestrian acrobat, bullfighter, and singer-dancer. He bequeaths important gifts to flamenco song, in the Tangos del Piyayo, and to dance, in the virtuosic jumps of the Farruco dynasty. El Negro Meri claimed mastery, body power, and transcendence—the freedom to become. An acrobat on a tightrope between European and American ghettoes of fictitious Blackness, he defied the blackface trope of the broken body and propelled European culture toward a complicated Modernism.

Parody and Sorrow

Faced with the loss of global hegemony, Spain claimed the outlaw Other as self. As in the United States, this dark vessel for the nation’s “soul” was fulsome in its ironic self-awareness and disillusioned sense of its own diminution. Mariano Soriano Fuertes’s El Tío Caniyitas (1849) records Spain’s response to U.S. blackface minstrelsy in terms of indigenous southern (Andalusian) representational tropes. Spain saw itself in the minstrelized figure of a dispossessed and fractured Black body, yet in this parody of power as powerlessness we sense flamenco’s tragic essence—its tormenting spirit—its duende. There is something of the sacred, of the sublime, in Spain’s exalted antiheroes, enduring public torture, degrading death, or the bondage from which they would not emerge alive. In absorbing American blackface’s heated rhetoric, perhaps because it was already inherent in such equivocal Spanish figures, developing flamenco seems to resonate with these deep and deeply violent contradictions.

Afterword

The projects of “fugitive planning and black study” are mostly about reaching out to find connection; they are about making common cause with the brokenness of being, a brokenness, I would venture to say, that is also blackness. —Jack Halberstam, The Undercommons Katherine Lee Bates’s 1899 article in ...

Nonsense of the Body

Three blackface clowns of the nascent United States dramatize humanist individuation and Enlightenment egalitarianism—alongside the racist ideas justifying slavery. “Mungo,” from Bickerstaff’s The Padlock (1768), like the Spanish Mingo, speaks impertinences to power. “Harlequin Friday,” from Sheridan’s Robinson Crusoe, or Harlequin Friday (1781) performs daring feats in blackface. These two share an essential ability to become: the bobo may find redemption in Christ, while Harlequin Friday can magically transform himself. But in Thomas Dartmouth Rice’s early-1830s “Jim Crow,” Spanish imperialist ideas about slavery—that, despite black lineage, Christian redemption was possible—were stripped away in favor of the racist ideology leaving “Jim Crow,” as demanded by white slave society, permanently broken, an existentially “happy slave.” Nonetheless, “Jim Crow’s” devilish jumping and raucous footwork still embody power, virtuosity, and veiled dissent, confounding this character’s supposed inevitability and “morality”—and also the idea that slavery ever succeeded in silencing its victims.

Concentric Circles of Theatricality

In early modern Spain, raza (race) signified the stain of Blackness, while casta (chaste, caste) signified purity of blood—Whiteness. But with its empire in decline, eighteenth-century Spain enacted its dreams of sovereignty and autonomy by impersonating a dark Other, whose Semitic and south-Saharan African antecedents were now wrapped within an imaginary Gitano. Majismo, emulating the fashions of the urban underclass, adopted the fandango, an American dance of slaves and outlaws, as an emblem of pure-blooded Spanishness. Adopting fandango dances such as the profane Mexican panaderos, an Africanist belly-to-belly dance incorporated into the bolero school repertoire, majismo figured the deeply political dissonance between the determinism of Christian blood purity and the possibility of redemption implicit in the bobo’s equivocal confusion. Ironically, the fandango was adopted throughout the Western world as a symbol of freedom and class mobility, a metaphor that soon inflected every aspect of the world’s perception of Spain.

Jaleo de Jerez and Tumulte Noir

Juana Vargas “La Macarrona,” a Gitana, was one of the greatest flamenco dancers of all time. Yet complex responses to her international debut in 1889 Paris set “authentic” performances against French “recreations” of Spanish dance. Developing new, tango (that is, Afro-Cuban)-inflected forms to attract international audiences, Macarrona’s “audacity,” “mad fury,” and suggestive hip déhanchements drew on long-standing tropes of Blackness, born “illegitimate” in diaspora, nativized as tokens of Spain’s colonial reach. Macarrona’s Paris reception reveals the conundrums of race being negotiated with the Gitana playing intermediary, casting her audacious glance backward to Spain and forward into the international arena, simultaneously representing Spain’s Blackness and its Whiteness. Long seen as outlaws, emblematic of “wildness” and “freedom,” French fascination with Macarrona reveals the racial politics of modernist desire to become, the ability and the privilege to dream of a life—in the words of Walt Whitman, “immense in passion, pulse, and power.”

Introduction

How is the politics of Blackness figured in the flamenco dancing body? Or, to put this question in another way, What does flamenco dance tell us about the construction of race in the Atlantic world? The idea of race, of Blackness as signifying religious confusion or misguidedness, and hence subjugated social status, evolved on the Iberian Peninsula during the ...