Prologue

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Prologue
• Elizabeth R. Wright

THIS DOUBLE ISSUE OF VOLUME 74 of the Bulletin of the Comediantes, featuring Nicholas R. Jones as guest editor, emerged from the colloquium devoted to Recovering Black Performance in Early Modern Iberia, held at Yale University on 29–30 April 2022. We are grateful to Jesús Velasco, chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, for hosting us at a time where restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic were severely limiting opportunities for scholarly community. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) provided the financing needed for an international gathering of this scale, as well as for the complex editing and production needed to transform the conference papers into research articles.

Nicholas Jones outlines the guiding principles and intellectual lineage for this issue in his prefatory essay, "On Recovery and Reparation." A few words are in order here about how this project on Recovering Black Performance has also expanded our horizons as a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. Aware of the rigors of the dynamic academic fields that converge around this topic, we instituted a two-staged peer-review process. In phase 1, a cadre of early career scholars provided a first line of feedback and recommendations based on the papers and ensuing debates at the colloquium. We thank Esteban Crespo Jaramillo, Jorge García Granados, Julia C. Hernández, Yelsy Hernández Zamora, Brais Lamela Gómez, and Cornesha Tweede. In turn, we elicited outside evaluations for each contribution following standard practices of a peer-reviewed journal. Our aim here was to make the scholarship published in this issue responsive to the questions and criteria of early-career academics, in addition to those of mid-career and senior scholars.

This particularly ambitious and capacious volume of the Bulletin of the Comediantes—with sixteen contributions and an introduction focused on Recovering Black Performance, plus a substantive research note by Jane W. Albrecht on the application of stylometric analysis of authorial attributions to the Spanish comedia, and twenty-three book reviews—drew on the astounding talents, energy, and devotion of the team of collaborators listed in our masthead and on our website. A heartfelt thanks.

As we prepared this issue, we lost three cherished colleagues who made enormous contributions to the fields that converge around this journal. We honor and celebrate this journal's long-serving editor, James A. Parr, with a pair of remembrances—from emeritus editor Edward Friedman and stalwart Editorial Board member Sharon Voros. We also lost Donald R. Larson, a [End Page 5] guiding light of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater, revered scholar, and resourceful translator. Most recently, Henry W. Sullivan passed away; readers of the journal will remember him as a mainstay of our editorial board and far-reaching scholar of the comedia. Jim, Don, and Henry will ever be among us. [End Page 6]

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