Theater and the Slave Trade in 15th- and 16th-Century Spain and Portugal

FAIN: FT-259833-18

Elizabeth Rebecca Wright
University of Georgia (Athens, GA 30602-0001)

Research for a book-length study of relationships between the Atlantic Slave Trade and the emergence of professional theater in early modern Spain and Portugal.

“Stages of Servitude in Early Modern Iberia” examines an enduring question about the Atlantic slave trade that first comes into view in Portugal and Spain in the late fifteenth century: why did early awareness of its cruelty and illegality not foment abolitionism? I ask how the thriving theater cultures of Spain and Portugal contributed to the naturalization of demeaning images of sub-Saharan Africans and the institutionalization of the Atlantic slave trade. Yet my book also considers a paradox: black Africans and Afro-descendant Iberians found rare chances for artistic validation and economic advancement in the theater business, working as musicians, actors, stagehands, and writers. My study is organized in five chapters (stages), understood in spatial-temporal terms as the cultural contexts where slave-holding was displayed. The completed book will enhance our understanding of Renaissance theater and empire building.

Associated Products

Situating Spain in the Early African Diaspora (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Situating Spain in the Early African Diaspora
Abstract: Juan Latino (circa 1517 – circa 1595) is Europe’s first known poet from the black slave diaspora. Navigating the tensions and complexities of Granada—the last redoubt of Islam in early modern Spain—he mobilized Latin erudition to claim liberty, financial stability, and public renown. This lecture examines the changing narratives of Juan Latino’s fama as a poet and educator of Renaissance Spain. In life, he cannily deployed Latin, Europe’s only cosmopolitan literary language, to conjure visions of a global empire for king Philip II while also warning this king about how racial bias would diminish his world power. Yet poets in the seventeenth century concealed Juan Latino’s accomplishments in vernacular poems steeped in the emerging tropes of minstrelsy. It is fitting, therefore, that a research trip to Spain in 1926 by an intellectual of the Harlem Renaissance recovered the epic of Juan Latino. Indeed, the gallery of notable writers construed by Arthur Schomburg in collaboration with Charles S. Johnson remains a compelling agenda for situating Spain in early-modern literary studies.
Author: Elizabeth R. Wright
Date: 09/10/18
Location: University of Pittsburgh
Primary URL: https://www.hispanic.pitt.edu/event/situating-spain-early-african-diaspora-diplomats-minstrels-and-memories-juan-latino
Primary URL Description: Univ. of Pittsburgh, Hispanic Studies

“Situating Spain in the Early African Diaspora: Diplomats, Minstrels, and the Memories of Juan Latino.” (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: “Situating Spain in the Early African Diaspora: Diplomats, Minstrels, and the Memories of Juan Latino.”
Abstract: Juan Latino (circa 1517 – circa 1595) is Europe’s first known poet from the black slave diaspora. Navigating the tensions and complexities of Granada—the last redoubt of Islam in early modern Spain—he mobilized Latin erudition to claim liberty, financial stability, and public renown. This lecture examines the changing narratives of Juan Latino’s fama as a poet and educator of Renaissance Spain. In life, he cannily deployed Latin, Europe’s only cosmopolitan literary language, to conjure visions of a global empire for king Philip II while also warning this king about how racial bias would diminish his world power. Yet poets in the seventeenth century concealed Juan Latino’s accomplishments in vernacular poems steeped in the emerging tropes of minstrelsy. It is fitting, therefore, that a research trip to Spain in 1926 by an intellectual of the Harlem Renaissance recovered the epic of Juan Latino. Indeed, the gallery of notable writers construed by Arthur Schomburg in collaboration with Charles S. Johnson remains a compelling agenda for situating Spain in early-modern literary studies.
Author: Elizabeth R. Wright
Date: 09/10/18
Location: University of Pittsburgh
Primary URL: https://www.hispanic.pitt.edu/event/situating-spain-early-african-diaspora-diplomats-minstrels-and-memories-juan-latino
Primary URL Description: Univ. of Pittsburgh, Hispanic Studies

On the Trail of a Shadowy Sir Lançelot: Remembering the First Atlantic Slave Voyage, from Zurara to Cervantes. (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: On the Trail of a Shadowy Sir Lançelot: Remembering the First Atlantic Slave Voyage, from Zurara to Cervantes.
Abstract: The public lecture traces forming, then fading memories of the first recorded Atlantic slave voyage.
Author: Elizabeth Wright
Date: 10-22-2021
Location: “” Queen’s University Belfast, Modern Languages Core Disciplinary Research Group Seminar (virtual).

The First Atlantic Slave Voyages (1444–1500): Lost Decades, New Methodologies, and an Age-Old Dilemma. (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: The First Atlantic Slave Voyages (1444–1500): Lost Decades, New Methodologies, and an Age-Old Dilemma.
Author: Elizabeth Wright
Abstract: Showcase for workshop of methodologies for recovering the lost histories of enslaved and free Blacks in early modern Iberia.
Date Range: 10/15/2020 - 10/16/2020
Location: Oxford University, virtual

Debating Black Urbanity in Early Modern Iberia. (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Debating Black Urbanity in Early Modern Iberia.
Author: Elizabeth Wright
Abstract: An invited presentation for the special colloquium titled, "Empire and its Aftermath: Transhispanic Dialogues on Diaspora.“”
Date: 4-4-2019
Conference Name: University of Pittsburgh, Department of Spanish

Black City Dwellers and the Foundations of Iberian Early Modernity. (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Black City Dwellers and the Foundations of Iberian Early Modernity.
Author: Elizabeth Wright
Abstract: I focused on chronicles from the mid-sixteenth century that reveal the ways that enslaved and free blacks contributed to cultural ferment in early modern Portugal and Spain. While many studies recover histories of diplomats, saints, soldiers, painters, and humanists, I consider the “Black [urban] Renaissance” whose agents remain anonymous or elusive.
Date: 03-18-2019
Conference Name: Renaissance Society of America, 65th Annual Meeting.

Don Quijote at the Crossroads (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Don Quijote at the Crossroads
Author: Elizabeth Wright
Abstract: The course drew on NEH-funded research to organize an immersive research project on the people and communities found at the cultural "crossroads" evoked in Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quijote.
Year: 2021
Audience: Undergraduate

Empire and Alterity (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Empire and Alterity
Author: Elizabeth Wright
Abstract: A graduate seminar whose historiographic and theoretical underpinnings emerged from the NEH-funded research.
Year: 2021
Audience: Graduate

Characters and Subjectivities in the Early Modern Theater (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Characters and Subjectivities in the Early Modern Theater
Author: Elizabeth Wright
Abstract: NEH-funded research underpinned the presentation of four plays in which Black saints, scholars, or soldiers are the protagonists.
Year: 2019
Audience: Graduate

Global Georgia lecture and colloquium series (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: Global Georgia lecture and colloquium series
Author: Benjamin Ehlers
Author: Elizabeth Wright
Abstract: Organized three public lectures (held via videoconference), a public film screening and conversation with the filmmaker, and a roundtable on teaching at the University of Georgia from September 2020 to April 2021. The guiding theme was one that emerged from the NEH-funded research: that is, how did the growing Atlantic slave trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shape societies that emerged in the Americas and in the Mediterranean. This was presented with Mellon Foundation support.
Date Range: 09-29-2020 to 04-01-2021
Location: University of Georgia, Willson Center for the Humanities and Arts

Fragmentary Facts, Muted Voices: Memories of the First Atlantic Slave Voyage (Article)
Title: Fragmentary Facts, Muted Voices: Memories of the First Atlantic Slave Voyage
Author: Wright, Elizabeth R.
Abstract: This book chapter traces the rhetorical moves with which three foundational chronicles of early-modern Iberian empire building pondered the urbanity of Black- and Afro-descendant residents of Spain and Portugal. Black Iberians contributed to the cultural ferment that transformed cities in Spain and Portugal at the dawn of early modernity, but chroniclers elided or occluded this agency. I trace a century of imperial historiography from Gomes Eanes de Zurara’s Chronica de la conquista de Guinea (1453), to Garcia de Resende’s Vida of João II of Portugal (circa 1535), and Bartolomé de las Casas’s monumental Historia de las Indias, finalized in the mid-sixteenth century. The one-century arc of my analysis inclines to a pair of abiding questions about “empire and its aftermath.” Why did full-throated abolitionism not emerge in the first century of the Atlantic Slave Trade, despite widespread recognition of its manifest depravity and dubious legality? Why, in turn, did the contributions of Black- and Afro-descendant Iberians fade from such paradigmatic meta-narratives of empire as Portugal’s Voyages of Discovery and Spain’s Golden Age?
Year: 2022
Format: Other
Periodical Title: Trajectories of Empire: Transhispanic Dialogues on the African Diaspora, edited by Jerome C. Branche
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press,

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