Abstract
Reviewed by: Matthew Machin-Autenrieth, University of Cambridge, UK
Scholars have long grappled with the complex and largely undocumented trajectory of flamenco’s development. Its sub-Saharan and African-American heritage is a particularly thorny area of study and one that has only started to receive scholarly attention. Sonidos Negros: On the Blackness of Flamenco is the first monograph to tackle seriously representations of ‘Blackness’ in flamenco, piecing together a plethora of transatlantic dance genres against the historical backdrop of colonialism, slavery and race relations. Covering the period 1492 to 1933, Goldberg explores how the politics of blackness has played out across secular and sacred domains, culminating in the nineteenth-century exotic figure of the Gypsy (Gitano). Drawing on theorists of the Black experience such as Gilroy and Fanon, the book considers how the Blackness of Moors and slaves that had been a category of Otherness against the (White) blood purity of Catholicism, transformed into a marker of national identity.
The book is structured in two parts under the framework of ida y vuelta (there and back), alluding to a repertoire of flamenco songs that traces its lineage to transatlantic connections between Spain and the Americas. In Part I (the ida), Chapter 1 focuses on the figure of the Pastor Bobo, a clownish and racialized character in medieval nativity plays that were popular in the Peninsula and the colonies, against the backdrop of the Inquisition and paranoia around blood purity. Through his noisy, confused and transgressive dance language, the Bobo performed Spanish anxieties around racialized Others – Gitanos, Moriscos (Muslims converted to Christianity) and negros (Blacks). In Chapter 2, Goldberg traces the emergence of a Spanish national identity during the eighteenth century in opposition to the infiltration of French culture under the Bourbon dynasty. Through nativized dances such as the fandango, Goldberg argues that symbols of Blackness and New World dance such as the chuchumbé were integrated into Spanish popular and theatrical culture. Moreover, this Blackness ‘was now wrapped within the figure of an “indigenous” racial Other: the imaginary Gitano’ (11).
In Part II (the vuelta), Chapter 3 focuses on the role of Gitanos in the development of flamenco framed by Spain’s decline on the global stage. Given the disappearance of Muslims and Moriscos, and the dramatic decline in the Afro-Spaniard population in west-Andalusian port cities, it was the Gitano that filled the space of these ‘vanished’ Others. Goldberg focuses on Mariano Soriano Fuertes’ El Tío Caniyitas, a popular Andalusian zarzuela that, through the figure of the Gitano and burlesque flamenco performances, presented an ‘assemblage of Spanish images of Blackness’ (102). Chapter 4 examines the circulation of blackface minstrelsy across the Atlantic in figures such as ‘Jim Crow’, ‘Mungo’ and ‘Harlequin Friday’. The central hypothesis is that elements of bodily deformity and otherness apparent in the dances of Blackness in medieval Spain and Europe came to influence American blackface minstrelsy.
Chapter 5 focuses on the Black male flamenco dancer and equestrian clown ‘El Negro Meri’ who performed at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. All but erased from flamenco history, Goldberg argues that ‘El Negro Meri’ synthesized centuries of Blackness in Spain through his noisy, clownish dancing and acrobatic jumping: ‘he was a black man playing in the field of racialized fantasy between two white colonial powers’ (147). Paradoxically, however, the white appropriation of Blackness presented a way for free black men to push back against these very same stereotypes of Blackness and the history of slavery. Chapter 6 focuses on the Gitana flamenco dancer ‘La Macarrona’ and her international debut at the 1889 Paris exposition. In Spain, Macarrona became respected as a prestigious and virtuosic dancer, yet in France she was sexualized and exoticized, as a burlesque figure in what Goldberg describes as ‘Africanized orientalism’ (177).
I wonder whether the final two chapters of the book would have benefited from a closer consideration of colonialism. As its empire crumbled towards the end of the nineteenth century, Spain turned its sights to North Africa (the land of the vanquished ‘Moors’). French–Spanish colonial ambitions played out over who would control Morocco, culminating in the formation of the French and Spanish protectorates in 1912. While I recognize the scholarly importance of Goldberg’s analysis of flamenco’s genealogical connections with the Americas, I would caution against reducing the representational ‘battles’ between France and Spain simply to conflicting interpretations of Blackness. Spain’s identity and cultural struggles at this time were not only figured vis-à-vis its Blackness, but also in relation to its colonial aspirations and, for some, the ‘revival’ of medieval, Muslim Spain.
One of the strengths of this book is the author’s ability to synthesize an array of genres and dances that criss-cross centuries, geographies and sacred/secular domains. As such, the book goes beyond simply flamenco scholarship and will be of interest to theorists of Blackness, dance historians and ethnomusicologists. Non-specialist readers, however, would have benefited from a glossary of terms in order to better navigate the plethora of genres and dances. Drawing on years of in-depth historical research, Goldberg has produced an important and complex scholarly contribution. Sonidos Negros will become fundamental reading for flamenco scholars and offers innovative insights into the complex genealogy of the tradition’s sub-Saharan and African-American roots. She convincingly shows how we can come to ‘understand flamenco’s pain, flamenco’s soul – flamenco’s power, through the experience of Blackness’ (16).