Reading Race: the Body as Archive and its Boundaries
The Making of Blackness Winter Seminars, organized and convened by Rubén Bracero Salvat, Erica Feild-Marchello, Jehbreal Muhammad Jackson, and Andrea Rueda Herrera, is a three-part seminar series that brings together researchers from Spain, the US, and the UK. The sessions raise questions of historiographical and methodological interest for research on race and Blackness in early modern Iberia with interest in exploring perspectives from diverse intellectual traditions and geographical and temporal contexts.
In our first session, “The Body as Archive I” Jehbreal Muhammad Jackson will lead us through a discussion of the benefits and complexities of researching beyond Western archives that focus on written text. We will explore alternative approaches that pose bodies as archives with special attention to those that center bodies that are afro-descended and racialized as black. Drawing on examples, provocations, and language provided by Katherine Dunham (Dances of Haiti, 1983, “Introduction,” “Dances and Their Divisions” and “Organization of the Dance Groups”) and Jasmine Johnson (“Black Dance,” 2017, Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism & Black Dance and the Politics of Movement [video]), we will consider how insight from the moving bodies of those subjugated and written about can help us respond to, move beyond, or reframe gaps in colonial archives. The second seminar, “The Body as Archive II” will continue to explore the theme through a conversation with the artist and flamenco dancer Yinka Esi Graves regarding her project, The Disappearing Act. This piece explores the African imprints in Flamenco taking the dissident body as a tool to resist and to be present despite disappearances. The third session will take the shape of a reading group that asks questions about how histories of race and Blackness in Morocco, Germany, and the US are (or are not) useful for studying histories of race and Blackness in Spain. What patterns emerge across geographical boundaries? What do such patterns suggest for our own scholarly approaches? What can be gained by crossing geographically defined disciplinary lines? What risks or challenges does crossing such lines entail? We will discuss: George Mariscal, “The Role of Spain in Contemporary Race Theory,” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 2 (1998): 7-22; Arne Spohr “Violence, Social Status, and Blackness in Early Modern Germany: The Case of the Black Trumpeter Christian Real (ca. 1643–after 1674)” in Beyond Exceptionalism: Traces of Slavery and the Slave Trade in Early Modern Germany, 1650-1850, eds. Rebekka von Mallinckrodt, Josef Köstlbauer, and Sarah Lentz (De Gruyter, 2021), 57-81; and Chouki El Hamel, Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam (Cambridge, 2012), Ch. 4: “Racializing” Slavery, 155-184 (we also recommend the Introduction, 1-14, but will focus on Ch. 4 during our conversation).
Attendance requires access links, but is open to new participants who can request information and links from the organizers by writing to makingofblackness@gmail.com.
This activity is a result of the project I+D+i PID2021-124893NA-I00: The Making of Blackness, A Process of Cultural and Social Negotiation from the Bottom-Up, funded by MCIN/ AEI/10.13039/501100011033.