: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain, and coeditor of Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology and Pornographic Sensibilities: Imagining Sex and the Visceral in Premodern and Early Modern Spanish Cultural Production.
Jones applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Cervantine Blackness, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Cervantine Blackness at the Penn State University Press website.[…] palpitates and perspires an erotic life of desire. Things are done in secrecy—behind and within closed doors.On page 99 of Cervantine Blackness, readers will meet my closing remarks on book’s third meditation, “Rethinking Luis.” This meditation historicizes and unpacks the sociocultural range of blackness exhibited by the old, black eunuch Luis from the story El celoso extremeño (1613). To achieve this, I distill and make meaning out of the intersecting phenomena that BDSM and pornography, music, queerness, and sound harness in my study of blackness as a fecund space to think through the material consequences of Cervantes’s construction of Luis.
I have always been struck by the homosocial, queer bond between Loaysa and Luis. Critics have also noticed their intimate proximity. In Del teatro a la novela: El ritual del disfraz en las Novelas ejemplares de Cervantes, Eduardo Olid Guerrero highlights how Loaysa “attracts and seduces” Luis with his guitar and music. Alban K. Forcione also confirms similar interactions between the two in his 1982 classic Cervantes and the Humanist Vision. What strikes me as odd remains how and why scholars have acknowledged, on the one hand, yet have evaded, on the other hand, the explicit naming—calling out the social interaction and proximity for what it is—of the textual potential apparent in Loaysa’s and Luis’s interracial and same- gendered bond to each other throughout the novella. I cannot help but to explore the productive possibility of queering Luis in these terms, along the lines of the same-gender relations between white men and black men. Expanding on our understanding of how queerness ebbs and flows in El celoso extremeño, I gravitate toward Roland Betancourt’s important work on Byzantium, eunuchs, and institutionalized spaces, where homosocial, homoerotic, and same-gender intimacy had room to maneuver in certain cordoned-off, private, or homosocial spaces, even if they manifested differently than in our own time.
Quoting Eve Sedgwick’s classic definition of “queer,” Betancourt reiterates that queerness for Sedgwick moves as an “open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excess of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.” On queerness I privilege Robert Reid-Pharr’s framing of the term: “If there’s one thing that marks us as queer, a category that is somehow different, if not altogether distinct, from the heterosexual, then it is undoubtedly our relationships to the body, particularly the expansive ways in which we utilize and combine vaginas, penises, breasts, buttocks, hands, arms, feet, stomachs, mouths and tongues in our expressions of not only intimacy, love, and lust, but also and importantly shame, contempt, despair, and hate.” The diversity of textual material from El celoso extremeño that captures Luis’s and Loaysa’s connection and proximity to each other, through music, song, and dance, implore us to rethink Luis, through modes, spaces, and temporalities of queerness, in terms of vulnerability. Vincent Woodard in The Delectable Negro compels us to think about how “a master would often choose a ‘favorite’ male slave as the […].
The Page 99 Test works beautifully and readers would get an excellent idea and sense of Cervantine Blackness. Uncannily, of the hundreds of pages in my book, page 99 is the very best single page to introduce browsers to the book’s core tenants. In short, the “test” absolutely serves as a good browser's shortcut to Cervantine Blackness, precisely because the book is deliberately irreverent, rambunctious, and wayward. Taking methodological cues from Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Cervantine Blackness concerns itself with breaking open archival documentation—literary and otherwise—from Cervantes’s and his contemporaries’ worlds so that they might yield a richer picture of pre-Enlightenment Iberian black social life. Through vulnerability and risks, I prefer to think of Cervantine Blackness as a fugitive text, marked by the errantry with which it identifies and that it catalogs. In this spirit and in its queerness, I read against the grain and press at the limits of the historical and literary archives associated with Cervantes and those in his writerly orbit. Waywardness in this book speculates about what might have been. As a method, the wild ideas reverberating in this book reimagine blackness through Cervantes’s spirit of irony conveyed in writings—yet also his pulcritud, or neatly nuanced details—that simultaneously flicker before our eyes.
--Marshal Zeringue
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