K. Meira Goldberg

Ninotchka Devorah Bennahum

Michelle Heffner Hayes

The language of the body is central to the study of flamenco. From the records of the Inquisition, to 16th century literature, to European travel diaries, the Spanish dancer beguiles and fascinates. The word flamenco evokes the image of a sensuous and rebellious woman--the bailaora --whose movements seduce the audience, only to reject their attention with a stomp of defiance. The dancer's body is an agent of ideological resistance, conveying a conflicting desire for subjectivity and autonomy and implying deeply held ideas about history, national identity, femininity and masculinity. This collection of new essays provides an overview of flamenco scholarship, illuminating flamenco's narrative and chronology and addressing some common misconceptions. The contributors offer fresh perspectives on age-old themes and suggest new paradigms for flamenco as a cultural practice. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Historical, Critical and Theoretical Perspectives

Flamenco on the Global Stage

"Sonidos Negros traces how, in the span between 1492--the year in which Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula coincided with Christopher Columbus's landing on Hispaniola--and 1933--when Andalusian poet Federico García Lorca published his 'Theory and Play of the Duende'--the Moor became Black, and how the imagined Gitano ("Gypsy," or Roma) embodies the warring images and sounds of this process. By the nineteenth-century nadir of its colonial reach, Spanish identity came to be enacted in terms of a minstrelized Gitano, a hybrid of American and Spanish representations of Blackness. The imagined Gypsy about which flamenco imagery turns dances on a knife's edge delineating Black and White worlds. Teetering between ostentatious and damning confusion and the humility of epiphany, this figure relates to an earlier Spanish trope: the pastor bobo (foolish shepherd), who, seeing an angelic apparition, must decide whether to accept the light of Christ--or remain in darkness. Spain's symbolic linkage of this religious peril with the Blackness of enslavement constitutes the evangelical narrative which vanquished the Moors and enslaved the Americas, an ideological framework that would be deployed by all the colonial slaving powers. The bobo's precarious state of confusion, appealingly comic but also holding the pathos of the ultimate stakes of his decision--heaven or hell, safety or extermination--opens up a teeming view of the embodied politics of colonial exploitation and creole identity formation. Flamenco's Sonidos Negros live in this eternal moment of bulla, the confusion and ruckus that protect embodied resistance to subjugation, the lament for what has been lost, and the values and aspirations of those rendered imperceptible by enslavement and colonization"--

On the Blackness of Flamenco

Sonidos Negros

Walter Aaron Clark

Antoni Pizà

Transatlantic Malagueñas and Zapateados is an exploration of two fandango dances, recording the circulations of people, imagery, music, and dance across what were once the Spanish and Portuguese Empires. Although these dance-musics seem to be mirror images, the unbreachable space between them reflects the political fault-lines along which nineteenth-century musical populism and folkloric nationalism extend into present-day debates about globalization, immigration, neoliberalism, and neofascism. If malagueñas are a fantastic incarnation of Spanishness, caught like a fly in amber by their anachronistic references to a fraught imperial past, noisy and raucous zapateado dances cut toward the future. Inherently marked by European conventions of zapatos (shoes), zapateados are nonetheless shaped by Africanist and Native American footwork traditions. In these Afro-Indigenous mestizajes, not only are European aesthetic values reordered and resignified, but the Catholic catechism which indoctrinated the New World yields to alternate spiritual systems springing out of a culture of resistance to European domination.

Spaniards, Natives, Africans, Roma

Transatlantic Malagueñas and Zapateados in Music, Song and Dance

How is the politics of Blackness figured in the flamenco dancing body? What does flamenco dance tell us about the construction of race in the Atlantic world? Sonidos Negros traces how, in the span between 1492 and 1933, the vanquished Moor became Black, and how this figure, enacted in terms of a minstrelized Gitano, paradoxically came to represent Spain itself. The imagined Gypsy about which flamenco imagery turns dances on a knife's edge delineating Christian and non-Christian, White and Black worlds. This figure's subversive teetering undermines Spain's symbolic linkage of religion with race, a prime weapon of conquest. Flamenco's Sonidos Negros live in this precarious balance, amid the purposeful confusion and ruckus cloaking embodied resistance, the lament for what has been lost, and the values and aspirations of those rendered imperceptible by enslavement and colonization.

The fandango, emerging in the early-eighteenth century Black Atlantic as a dance and music craze across Spain and the Americas, came to comprise genres as diverse as Mexican son jarocho, the salon and concert fandangos of Mozart and Scarlatti, and the Andalusian fandangos central to flamenco. From the celebrations of humble folk to the theaters of the European elite, with boisterous castanets, strumming strings, flirtatious sensuality, and dexterous footwork, the fandango became a conduit for the syncretism of music, dance, and people of diverse Spanish, Afro-Latin, Gitano, and even Amerindian origins. Once a symbol of Spanish Empire, it came to signify freedom of movement and of expression, given powerful new voice in the twenty-first century by Mexican immigrant communities. What is the full array of the fandango? The superb essays gathered in this collection lay the foundational stone for further exploration.

K. Meira Goldberg

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