The Valiant Black Man in Flanders / El valiente negro en Flandes


Book Description

A play about defiance of systemic racism. Juan de Mérida, an Afro-Spanish soldier aspires to social advancement in the Netherlands during the Eighty Years' War (1566-1648). His main enemies are not Dutch rebels but his white countrymen, whom he defeats at every attempt to humiliate him. In this play one encounters military culture, upward mobility, mistaken identities, defying destiny, royal pageantry, swordfights, cross-dressing, revenge, homosexual anxiety, and inter-racial marriage. Andrés de Claramonte’s El valiente negro en Flandes (c.1625) is an Afrodiasporic play that enjoyed great success and multiple stagings in Spain and in Latin America. Its 1938 negrista performance in Havana, Cuba, and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, attest to the power of this play to illuminate contemporary racial dynamics. This is the first annotated, critical edition and English translation of El valiente negro en Flandes with a comprehensive introduction, three critical essays, the critical apparatus comparing the eleven extant versions of the play, and an appendix with alternative scenes and related historical documents. A tool for scholars of early modern European literature and a pedagogical aid to discuss the early discourses on Blackness in Spain and its trans-Atlantic empire.










Catalogue of the Library


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Obras escogidas


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Saint Genest


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Space, Drama, and Empire


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Spanish poet, playwright, and novelist Félix Lope de Vega (1562–1635) was a key figure of Golden Age Spanish literature, second only in stature to Cervantes, and is considered the founder of Spain’s classical theater. In this rich and informative study, Javier Lorenzo investigates the symbolic use of space in Lope’s drama and its function as an ideological tool to promote an imagined Spanish national past. In specific plays, this book argues, historical landscapes and settings were used to foretell and legitimize the imperial present in Hapsburg Spain, allowing audiences to visualize and plot, as on a map, the country’s expansionist trajectory throughout the centuries. By focusing on connections among space, drama, and empire, this book makes an important contribution to the study of literature and imperialism in early modern Spain and equally to our understanding of the role and political significance of spatiality in Siglo de Oro comedia.