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Beyond Othello: Juan Latino in Black America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 December 2019

EMILY WEISSBOURD
EMILY WEISSBOURD*
Affiliation:
Department of English, Lehigh University. Email: emw616@lehigh.edu.
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Abstract

This essay focusses on references to the sixteenth-century black poet and scholar Juan Latino in African American journals in the 1920s–1940s. Although Juan Latino is largely forgotten in the present day, publications such as the Journal of Negro History and the New Negro referred to the poet as an important figure in the intellectual history of the African diaspora. My essay posits Juan Latino (both the historical figure and an early modern play about him) as an alternative exemplar of blackness in early modern Europe to that found in Othello. By turning to Juan Latino instead of to Othello, scholars in the 1920s–1940s were able to suggest a transnational and transhistorical black diasporic identity linked with African American solidarity with the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.

Type
Forum
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 1 , February 2020 , pp. 59 - 65
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2019

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References

1 There is a growing cohort of scholars within Hispanic studies who have offered incisive readings of some of these plays; however, the critical corpus around them comes nowhere close to that surrounding, for example, representations of race in Othello. See Beusterien, John, An Eye on Race: Perspectives from Theater in Imperial Spain (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Burshatin, Israel, “Playing the Moor: Parody and Performance in Lope de Vega's El Primer Fajardo,” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 107, 3 (May 1992), 566–81Google Scholar; Jones, Nicholas R., “Cosmetic Ontologies, Cosmetic Subversions: Articulating Black Beauty and Humanity in Luis de Góngora's’ En La Fiesta Del Santísimo Sacramento’,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 15, 1 (Winter 2015), 26–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar;  Jones, , Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Molinero, Baltasar Fra, La Imagen de Los Negros En El Teatro Del Siglo de Oro (Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1995)Google Scholar.

2 I have treated this topic at length elsewhere. See Weissbourd, Emily, “‘I Have Done the State Some Service’: Reading Slavery in Othello through Juan Latino,” Comparative Drama, 47 (2013), 529–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Schomburg, Arthur A., “Juan Latino, Magister Latinus,” in Johnson, Charles Spurgeon, ed., Ebony and Topaz (New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1971; first published  1927), 69–27Google Scholar.

4 Fleming, Beatrice and Pryde, Marion, Distinguished Negroes Abroad (Washington, DC: The Associated Publishers, 1946)Google Scholar.

5 Spratlin, Velaurez B., “The Negro in Spanish Literature,” Journal of Negro History, 19, 2 (April 1934), 60–71, 60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Reid-Pharr, Robert F., Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-humanist Critique (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Rivers, W. Napoleon, “Why Negroes Should Study Romance Languages and Literature,” Journal of Negro History, 19, 2 (April 1934), 118–36, 119CrossRefGoogle Scholar, italics mine.

8 Ibid., 120.

9 Spratlin, 61.

10 I am indebted to my colleague Marilisa Jimenez-Garcia for pointing out Juan Latino's significance to Afro-Latino literature and Latinx studies, a topic that is outside of the purview of this study.

11 For renewed critical attention to Juan Latino see Gates, Henry Louis Jr. and Wolff, Maria, “An Overview of Sources on the Life and Work of Juan Latino, the ‘Ethiopian Humanist’,” Research in African Literatures, 29, 4 (Winter 1998), 14–51Google Scholar; Wright, Elizabeth, The Epic of Juan Latino: Dilemmas of Race and Religion in Renaissance Spain (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 The Battle of Lepanto, ed. and trans. Wright, Elizabeth R., Spence, Sarah and Lemon, Andrew (Boston, MA: Tatti Renaissance Library, Harvard University, 2014)Google Scholar.

13 Wright, 181–83.

14 For the important critical work that has been done on these plays so far, largely within Hispanic studies, see note 1 above.

15 Jones, Staging Habla de negros.