Cervantine Blackness

“Cervantine Blackness dazzles: a fearless second book that invokes Black studies to explode its disciplinary paradigms. This book interrogates the complex archival and transhistorical roles that Blackness, Black people, and Black scholars navigate, refusing the easy legibility of the frameworks of agency versus oppression. Nicholas R. Jones’s searing indictment of early modern Iberian studies bursts forth from the confines of his previous scholarly skin much like the serpentine imagery that propels his reevaluation of the Cervantine.” —Xine Yao,author of Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America “Cervantine Blackness is an exceptional example of how literary analysis, history, philology, and critical race theory can be perfectly integrated to offer new perspectives on early modern Iberian blackness. Jones provides fresh and innovative insights and contributions that are sure to inform and shape future research and scholarship in the field.” —Victor Sierra Matute, Baruch College, CUNY “Cervantine Blackness is a homily. Jones forces readers to reckon with the perils of frameworks that flatten Black people into caricatures that appease white imperial and slaveocratic sensibilities. The good news is Jones does not leave us despondent. Incorporating the dynamism of critical Black studies into Cervantine studies, Jones offers theories of Blackness that makes room for characters to move in undulating complexity. This book is an edifying sermon for honest, diligent, and creative thinkers.” —Todne Thomas,author of Kincraft: The Making of Black Evangelical Sociality