As its title states, Nicholas R. Jones's Staging “Habla de Negros”: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain is a radical departure from current scholarship about the representation of Black people in Spanish early modern literature. It is a careful reinterpretation of habla de negros (Black speech), the literary form of Africanized Castilian (Spanish) used by white writers to represent the speech of Black characters in songs, plays, narratives, and poems. In the Introduction, Jones establishes habla de negros as a performative act that reveals, like a palimpsest, agency and subjectivity in Black characters that cannot be seen solely as products of the authors’ racist ideology. The book is organized around a series of close readings of texts in habla de negros by Luis de Góngora, Rodrigo de Reinosa, and Lope de Rueda. Critical race theory, especially Black feminist theory, furnishes its apparatus to interpret these texts as performative expressions of Black agency and resistance.

Jones maintains that these texts represent, indirectly and independently of their authors’ intentions, aspects of the Black experience in early modern Spain. The unstable linguistic reality of habla de negros as speech form allows for a subversion of the imperial hegemony represented by standard Castilian, with which works written in habla de negros maintain a dialectic relation. Jones insists in viewing habla de negros as a form of speech that conveys multiple meanings of Blackness. Therefore it cannot be separated from other elements of early modern Black performance: dance, sound, costume, food, and ultimately, the self-fashioning of the Black body. As Jones states persuasively, writing in habla de negros was “cool” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, much like today's listening to hip-hop, both as performance and as consumption of Blackness by non-Black communities: “the proliferation of habla de negros occupied a ‘mainstream’ status in early modern Spain” (25).

Chapter 1 develops at length the conceptualization of habla de negros as the linguistic form of blackface, the verbal material white actors used when they performed in actual blackface. Jones follows John Beusterien's pathbreaking An Eye on Race and Saidiya Hartman's Scenes of Subjection in seeing the use of blackface as an indictment of the white gaze and whiteness itself. Habla de negros, as a form of blackface, creates a dual body that competes with itself. The example of Góngora's letrilla for the Feast of the Holy Sacrament proves the point. The two Black women speakers, Juana and Clara, announce they are going to blacken not just their eyes with kohl—a popular dark substance still used as an eyeliner today—but also their faces in what seems as an “incorrect” form of adorning themselves (41): “Góngora's poetic representation of Juana and Clara's cosmetic subversion upholds black women's beauty as exemplary in comparison to the received wisdom that warned against the adulterous and dangerous effects of cosmetics on white women” (42).

Habla de negros was the verbal vehicle of a dizzying variety of bailes de negros, such as the gurumbé, zarabanda, zarambeque, or guineo; these African diasporic forms of music and dance were always a hit on the Spanish stage. Their lyrics and rhythmic structures are testimony of a religious and sacred conception and practice of the word accompanying the Black body in movement throughout the Black Atlantic that continues to this day in flamenco and different forms of song and dance in Latin America (49 and passim). Jones insists on the need to study current habla de negros with critical complexity, as with the example of Grammy Award–winner Jordi Savall's “musical memoir” Les Routes de l'esclavage (“The Routes of Slavery”), which “reminds us that there still exist responsible efforts to convey and produce on stage and in a recording studio the complex beauty of the sonic Blackness of habla de negros” (68–9).

To understand the performative acts of habla de negros, Jones maintains that it “cannot be theorized without a close reading of the term ‘bozal’” (79). Bozal is the racialized name used in early modern Iberia to refer to enslaved Black people newly arrived in the Iberian Peninsula who did not speak standard Spanish. The book's take on Simón Aguado's entremés (one-act play) Los negros (1602) focuses on the “black mouth” of the bozal (72), whose use of language becomes an act of rebellion by the enslaved Black couple as they claim the right to be married against the wishes of their masters. The play ends with a celebratory enumeration of the banquet food that goes beyond buffoonery and gives the lie to the concept of a bozal as intellectually inferior (69–77).

The tour de force question in the book concerns whether white authors and actors could create speech acts with Black diasporic effect. As the case in point, Chapter 2 is devoted to a close reading of one of the earliest written forms of habla de negros, Rodrigo de Reinosa's poem “Gelofe, Mandinga.” A Black woman, Comba, and a Black man, Jorge, engage in a tirade of mutual insults that belittle each other's African ethnic origin and engage in “an obscene philology of Africanity” that is studied through the lens of Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s concept of signifying (97). Reinosa's poem shows familiarity with the verbal games—akin to playing the dozens—of ritual insult in African diasporic traditions. Jones sustains that Comba and Jorge's long exchange would be historically and socially accurate in sixteenth-century Seville in the context of an urban Black audience, whose members would recognize these verbal games as an exercise in subversion through illegibility (103–4).

Chapter 3, “Black Divas, Black Feminisms,” addresses the gendered voice of Black women in possession of agency with two characters in two of Lope de Rueda's plays, Eulalla in Eufemia and Guiomar in Los engañados. According to Cervantes, Lope de Rueda was a celebrated impersonator of negra characters. Jones reads these two Black figures as “black divas” (125 and passim). Eulalla's preoccupation with lightening her skin and bleaching her hair drives her white suitor away. She demands from him material goods, including a parrot and a female monkey, which would equate her to a white aristocratic lady, thus putting into question the Spanish imperial impulse to conquer humans and animals alike (134). Eulalla's self-fashioning destabilizes the concept of white beauty and whiteness itself, much as Beyoncé does in the twenty-first century through what Stuart Hall calls an act of translation or process of cultural change (142–5). Equally empowered is the voice of Guiomar, who defends her African royal lineage in front of a white maid who treats her words with derision. Her listing of an African genealogy and her condition as a mother of a son who writes to her from Puerto Rico open a reading of Guiomar as a Black feminist subject who uses habla de negros to articulate her diasporic condition, that is, her awareness of Africa as a historical concept and the experience of fragmentation of the bonds of family.

Interpreting habla de negros is a complex philological enterprise. There are a few mistranslations that never compromise the theoretical architecture of this monograph. The politics of translation in this book is worthy of notice: Jones has considered it unnecessary to render habla de negros texts into African American English Vernacular, preferring Standard English: “As a translator of habla de negros my task . . . ultimately consists of finding that intended effect upon the language into which I am translating that produces in it the echo of the original” (xxiii). The exceptions are what he calls cases of metaphorical translations at key moments, as they illustrate for a non-Spanish-speaking readership the subversive excess of the text being critically analyzed. The habla de negros is more than a piece of erudite interest. In the Afterword, Jones reminds scholars that it is a living linguistic repertoire that shows up in Black Atlantic religious ceremonies. The African divine voices choose to speak to the initiates in habla de negros, the language crafted by their enslaved ancestors.