Spaces of Cultural Negotiation

Music and Dance in the Street, in Courts, and on Board Ships

Bibliographic Data

ID20050158
AuthorsDiana Berruezo-Sánchez (0000-0003-4629-3614, corresponding author)
Year2024
Pages131-160
Publication date2024-09-05
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueBlack Voices in Early Modern Spanish Literature, 1500-1750 (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University PressOxford (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/9780198914259.003.0005
OpenAlexW4401404694
ISBN9780198914259
LanguageEN
References cited157

This chapter examines literary, visual, and historical sources that are testament to black Africans playing music and singing in houses, streets, taverns, and confraternities. It explores three broad categories of spaces—streets, courts, and ships—as sites of cultural negotiation for black musicians and performers. The agency of black musicians and dancers and the limitations placed upon them are further illuminated by considering two very different black figures: Joan Domingo Moreno, a black man in mid-sixteenth-century Valencia; and Francisco the Meneses, a black man who paid for his manumission with money earned from dancing. Both stories confirm that city streets in particular were a productive space of cultural and social negotiation for black people in early modern Spain

Business · Negotiation · Social science · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories