Spanish Acts: Black-Brown Performances and Aesthetic Production in the 19th-Century Americas

• In Event: Entanglements of Blackness and Brownness in the Aesthetic Production of the Americas

Abstract

This paper maps out a pervasive, if subtle, trope of Latinx and African American aesthetic works: the strategy of passing as Spanish to approach whiteness, and the potentialities for freedom afforded by a racial category close to, but not entirely Anglo-American whiteness. I suggest that representations of passing as Spanish/depictions of Spanishness in 19th century-literary works by and about Latinx, African Americans, and Indigenous subjects highlight the influence of concurrent geographies and ecologies in cultural production about and by brown and black subjects. My paper situates Spanishness as an ethno-racial category troubling the relationship between blackness, brownness, and whiteness.

I follow in the wake of scholars like Silvio Torres-Saillant (2003), José Esteban Muñoz (2000, 2007) and Claudia Milian (2013), who, in their reading of black studies scholarship, respectively and collectively ask us to re-think the ontological and affective tenets undergirding the ethno-racial forms of Latinidad. In thinking alongside these scholars, I pivot towards the nineteenth-century as a crucial stage for the interplay of brown and black feeling. While a number of works point to the existence of a Latinx nineteenth century, few offer works that postulate how Latinx and African American lives operated within and across each other. I examining characters in William Wells Brown's 1853 novel Clotel and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's 1872 Who Would Have Thought It?, two texts that speak on the ambiguities of minoritarian life in the nineteenth century. In doing so, my paper notes the usage of mixed-raced subjects passing as Spanish to query how figures in the 19th century U.S. trickily invoked overlapping racial formations within and against anxieties about empire, slavery, and migration.

Finally, I look to the passings within these texts as a shared performance practice captured in literary form, an intertextual mode of corporeal presentation pervasive throughout Latinx and African American cultural production. Lingering in the ever-present relationship between textuality and performance I offer readings that think across these forms as necessary for engaging with the aesthetic stuff of the past.

In short, I posit the relationship between racial passing and Spanishness, both separate and in conjunction, as key to understanding representations of Latinx, Black, and Indigenous life in the aesthetic work of the Americas.

Author

• Christofer Rodelo, Harvard University