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Nicholas R. Jones (Assistant Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Yale University)

This presentation delves into the depths of Miguel de Cervantes’s portrayal of black Africans and sub-Saharan Africa in Nicholas R. Jones’s latest scholarly work, Cervantine Blackness (Penn State UP, 2024). With Cervantine Blackness, Jones challenges entrenched paradigms and invites a reevaluation of the complexities surrounding racialized blackness and black social life in Cervantes’s literary corpus. By recalibrating the focus from conventional narratives of “agency” and “resistance” to a nuanced understanding of black subjects within Cervantes’s works, Jones offers a systematic deconstruction of long-standing prejudices that seeks to forge new paths in literary and cultural criticism. This lecture will challenge its audience to rethink the portrayal of blackness in early modern literature writ large and, more importantly, its implications for contemporary discourse.