De la invisibilidad a la especulación crítica: Un esgrimista y poeta negro en el inédito Entremés segundo del negro

Abstract:

This study examines and recontextualizes the anonymous Entremés segundo del negro, whose Black protagonist is a courageous swordsman and a poet skilled in sonnet writing. Comic intrigue focuses on the marriage his enslavers arrange to Francisca, a Black woman. To date, scholars have relegated this entremés to secondary importance by contemplating it as a sequel to another entremés, Luis Quiñones de Benavente's El negrito hablador. Following on methodological proposals for "critical fabulation" (Saidiya Hartman) and "responsible speculation" (Rebecca Olson), this study presents the entremés as a point of departure for new methods of analysis, with the goal of recovering underexplored images of Blacks as active cultural agents in early modern Spain. To bring new attention to this comic drama that survives in just one seventeenth-century manuscript, an appendix offers an annotated edition in modernized orthography.