Nicholas R Jones
Nicholas R. Jones is the former King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center’s Scholar-in-Residence at New York University (2021-2022) and author of the award-winning book Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (Penn State University Press, May 2019). His new single-authored book, Cervantine Blackness (https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09877-7.html), comes out in November 2024.
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“Protest and Dissimulation: Muslims and Other Minorities in the Spanish-Speaking World” will explore the challenges faced by religious and ethnic minority communities in the Spanish-speaking world from the Middle Ages through the present day and examine the strategies that those communities used to resist, circumvent, survive, and even flourish under the pressure of those challenges. Through discussion and conversation, the evening will yield questions and modes of thinking that are grounded in the unique histories, literatures, and cultures of the Spanish-speaking world and that participants, attendees, and discussants can carry with them out into the wider contemporary world that is presenting its own evolving set of challenges to many modern communities.
This round-table and teach-in will take place on Thursday, December 1, from 6-8pm in the Great Room of 13-19 University Pl. A light supper will be served and attendees are encouraged to continue the discussion over the meal. The event will be live-streamed and archived online.
Speakers will include:
Farah Dih, NYU: "A Caste Society in the First Spanish Modernity"
Erica Field, NYU: “Dissimulation, Piety, and Fear”
Sibylle Fischer, NYU: "Stop Whining: On Politics of Racelessness and Executive Violence in Spanish America"
Nicholas Jones, Bucknell University: “Do Black Lives Matter in Spanish Early Modernity? Blackness, Cognitive Dissonance, Dissimulation”
Seth Kimmel, Columbia University: “The Ends of Multiculturalism”
S.J. Pearce, NYU: “Medieval Jews and Muslims in the Modern Nation”
“Protest and Dissimulation: Muslims and Other Minorities in the Spanish-Speaking World” will explore the challenges faced by religious and ethnic minority communities in the Spanish-speaking world from the Middle Ages through the present day and examine the strategies that those communities used to resist, circumvent, survive, and even flourish under the pressure of those challenges. Through discussion and conversation, the evening will yield questions and modes of thinking that are grounded in the unique histories, literatures, and cultures of the Spanish-speaking world and that participants, attendees, and discussants can carry with them out into the wider contemporary world that is presenting its own evolving set of challenges to many modern communities.
This round-table and teach-in will take place on Thursday, December 1, from 6-8pm in the Great Room of 13-19 University Pl. A light supper will be served and attendees are encouraged to continue the discussion over the meal. The event will be live-streamed and archived online.
Speakers will include:
Farah Dih, NYU: "A Caste Society in the First Spanish Modernity"
Erica Field, NYU: “Dissimulation, Piety, and Fear”
Sibylle Fischer, NYU: "Stop Whining: On Politics of Racelessness and Executive Violence in Spanish America"
Nicholas Jones, Bucknell University: “Do Black Lives Matter in Spanish Early Modernity? Blackness, Cognitive Dissonance, Dissimulation”
Seth Kimmel, Columbia University: “The Ends of Multiculturalism”
S.J. Pearce, NYU: “Medieval Jews and Muslims in the Modern Nation”
A searing work of literary criticism and political debate, Cervantine Blackness speaks to specialists and nonspecialists alike—anyone with a serious interest in Cervantes’s work who takes seriously a critical reckoning with the cultural, historical, and literary legacies of agency, antiblackness, and refusal within the Iberian Peninsula and the global reaches of its empire.
Focusing on Spanish Golden Age theater and performative poetry from authors such as Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Rueda, and Rodrigo de Reinosa, Jones makes a strong case for revising the belief, long held by literary critics and linguists, that white appropriations and representations of habla de negros language are “racist buffoonery” or stereotype. Instead, Jones shows black characters who laugh, sing, and shout, ultimately combating the violent desire of white supremacy. By placing early modern Iberia in conversation with discourses on African diasporic studies, Jones showcases how black Africans and their descendants who built communities in early modern Spain were rendered legible in performative literary texts.
Accessibly written and theoretically sophisticated, Jones’s groundbreaking study elucidates the ways that habla de negros animated black Africans’ agency, empowered their resistance, and highlighted their African cultural retentions. This must-read book on identity building, performance, and race will captivate audiences across disciplines.
de 2020 se originó un intenso debate en los medios de comunicación y
las redes sociales sobre la actualidad del escritor, su función como
icono de la cultura del imperio español en un contexto post-colonial y
post-imperial, la funcionalidad de las estatuas en el espacio público y
el compromiso del mundo académico con los movimientos sociales
como Black Lives Matter. Primero, una serie de académicos expondrán
sus particulares visiones del evento. Después, el acto se abrirá a los
asistentes. Este debate, que utiliza las nuevas tecnologías de la
información, es un intento de establecer un espacio de comunicación
fértil, un ágora o “mentidero” digital, una academia de Argamasilla... JULIO VÉLEZ-SAINZ