In 1938, Velaurez B. Spratlin published a short monograph entitled Juan Latino: Slave and Humanist (Spinner Press). Spratlin was the first African American to receive a PhD in Spanish in the United States (from Middlebury College in 1931), and a professor of Romance languages at Howard University. He was also an early member of the College Language Association (originally the Association of Teachers of English in Negro Colleges), an organization founded in 1937 in response to the exclusion of blacks from the Modern Language Association. Spratlin's monograph recounts the life of Juan Latino, a black African born into slavery in Spain who became a celebrated Latin poet, a teacher at the University of Granada, and the husband of a white Spanish noblewoman, Ana Carlobal. The second half is a verse translation, in pseudo-Elizabethan English, of Diego Jiménez de Enciso's play Juan Latino (approx. 1610–21), which fictionalizes the poet's life and accomplishments.

Juan Latino is one of a number of early modern Spanish plays with black protagonists, which have remained largely overlooked by scholars focussed on representations of race in literature.Footnote ¹ This is particularly surprising given the number of plays with black characters in the Golden Age comedia; in an informal survey of one book and four articles on the topic, I counted thirty-nine extant theatrical works (plays, religious pageants or autos sacramentales and intervals or entremeses) that feature characters with speaking parts who are explicitly described as negro/a or mulato/a – and this is by no means a complete list. As a comparatist, I am particularly interested in using these plays to decenter Othello in discussions of representations of blackness in early modern drama. These plays grant us a radically different version of blackness in early modern European literature, celebrating the achievements (and, in at least two instances, marriage to a white Spanish noblewoman) of heroic black military leaders, scholars and saints. Significantly, however, these achievements can only remain an object of celebration if they are represented as a service to a white, Christian Spanish state – and that service (as is not explicitly the case in Othello) is almost always linked, through imagery, plot or both, to slavery.Footnote ² To my knowledge, Spratlin's book contains the only published translation of any of these plays into English.

Although both Juan Latino the historical figure and the play that bears his name are relatively unknown today, in the first half of the twentieth century references to Juan Latino peppered African American journals, holding him up as an early exemplar of black intellectualism. Juan Latino is mentioned in publications such as the Journal of Negro History and the Journal of Race Development, and is the subject of an essay by Arturo Schomburg in the miscellany Ebony and Topaz.Footnote ³ A fictionalized account of his early life appears in a 1946 book designed to meet “the need for extending the study of the Negro in junior and senior high schools,” Distinguished Negroes Abroad.Footnote ⁴ The authors of this last example clearly used Spratlin as their source, quoting extensively from his translation of the play. All of these articles emphasize both Juan Latino's intellectual accomplishments and his acceptance in (and indeed celebration by) Spanish society. In doing so, they offer a heroic model of black intellectualism, implicitly intervening in the Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois debate about the education of African Americans to assert the significance of education in the liberal arts.

What, if anything, does this history have to do with Shakespeare's Othello? A few glancing comparisons to Othello appear in Spratlin's book, and also show up in an earlier article by Spratlin, the 1934 “The Negro in Spanish History.” The article draws on early modern Spanish plays as well as historical figures to describe the black presence in Spanish and Latin American literature and history. Interestingly, Spratlin frames his discussion of Spanish history and literature with a reference to Othello. He begins by excoriating the racism of the 1933 film version of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, then continues,

Spratlin goes on to discuss representations of blackness in early modern Spanish drama, and notable Afro-Spanish and Afro-Latino historical figures. He does so to make a case for the fitness of a black man to play Othello, offering Spanish texts and histories as evidence to present before the “biased tribunal” of white America. (He is also, I suspect, offering an implicit critique of the fact that at this point Paul Robeson had played Othello in London but not yet in the United States.) For Spratlin, Shakespeare functions as an emblem of universal humanity, an “unerring genius” to whom he lays claim. In beginning his article with a reference to Othello, Spratlin positions Shakespeare at the center, making the Spanish texts he discusses serve as evidence of the right of African Americans to claim Shakespeare. If, however, we instead place Spain at the center and Othello at the periphery, another significant history of evocations of early modern history and texts among African American intellectuals becomes visible. More specifically, in African American journals in the first half of the twentieth century, and particularly the 1930s, a number of African American intellectuals – primarily Hispanists – use the figure of Juan Latino as well as early modern Spanish representations of blackness more generally as an important locus for producing a transnational and transhistoric intellectual genealogy of the African diaspora.

It is far from incidental that Juan Latino: Slave and Humanist was published in 1938, in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, nor that many of the articles that discuss Juan Latino were published in the 1930s. As Robert S. Reid-Pharr has recently demonstrated,

Solidarity with Spain, according to Reid-Pharr, becomes linked with resistance to antiblack aggression. Indeed, both Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes traveled to Spain and wrote about their sympathy with the Republican cause.

Discussions of exemplary black figures in early modern Spanish literature and history in African American journals in the 1930s can thus be read as part of a larger discourse that aligns African American intellectualism with Spain's fight against fascism. These discussions often propose that representations of blackness in Spain offer a richer and more complex genealogy of the African diaspora than can be found in English-language sources. Turning to Spain becomes not only a way to demonstrate the importance of African Americans within the US, but also an evocation of a cosmopolitan and international black diasporic identity. In 1934, W. Napoleon Rivers discussed Juan Latino in his article “Why Negroes Should Study Romance Languages and Literature.” He succinctly lays out his reasoning at the article's opening:

Rivers points to Spain (along with France, Italy and Portugal) as a place with a long history of contact with Africa (including the period in which much of Spain was under Islamic rule originating in North Africa), and where exemplary men of African descent had left their mark on the culture. Interestingly, two of the three examples he cites are black protagonists of early modern Spanish plays: Juan Latino (unsurprisingly) and Juan de Mérida, the protagonist of Andrés de Claramonte's play El valiente negro en Flandes (The Valiant Black Man in Flanders) (c.1612–20). Juan de Mérida, unlike Juan Latino, is a fictional character; nonetheless, Rivers uses the character as evidence that “although the fact is not stressed in the usual histories of Spain, written in English, we know that Africans, as officers and common soldiers, served with distinction under Spanish arms in the revolt of the Netherlands.”Footnote ⁸ For Rivers, the play seems to be important primarily as a form of historical evidence, testifying to the inclusion of black Africans in the early modern Spanish army. Similarly, Rivers cites Spratlin's translation of the play Juan Latino as well as his biography of the historical figure, drawing on early modern Spanish drama in order to assert the presence of black Africans in early modern Spain.

Rivers argues that learning foreign languages (and particularly Romance languages) will make available to black Americans a larger diasporic history that has been neglected by white scholars, as well as granting them access to (and employment opportunities in) countries and cultures that afforded more possibilities to people of color. While Rivers's interest is not primarily the Spanish comedia, his turn to the black protagonists of early modern Spanish plays is a testament to their utility for his project of making a black presence more visible. In the article I began this essay by citing, Spratlin also argues for the importance of turning to Spain to establish a transnational and transhistorical diasporic identity.Footnote ⁹ Spratlin also, crucially, draws a connection between early modern black Spaniards and the rich history of Afro-Latino literature on both sides of the Atlantic.Footnote ¹⁰

Spratlin, Rivers and others advocate a turn to Spain to uncover a sustained black historical presence. To that end, they read plays such as Juan Latino and El valiente negro en Flandes largely as evidence of that presence. In recent years, a resurgence of interest in the historical figure of Juan Latino has begun to make the poet's work more accessible to readers and scholars in the Anglosphere.Footnote ¹¹ The first complete English translation of Juan Latino's Latin epic on the battle of Lepanto, Austrias Carmen, was published in 2014.Footnote ¹² Elizabeth Wright, one of the poem's translators, offers an insightful reading of the poet's life and work in her 2016 monograph The Epic of Juan Latino: Dilemmas of Race and Religion in Renaissance Spain. (The book's epilogue, entitled “Juan Latino in the Harlem Renaissance,” in fact describes Afro-Latino historian and activist Arthur (Arturo) Schomburg's interest in the poet in the 1920s.)Footnote ¹³

While the historical figure of Juan Latino has begun to attract the interest of scholars, this focus has not extended to the fictional representations of blackness in the plays discussed by Spratlin and Rivers, which remain largely inaccessible to those who do not read Spanish.Footnote ¹⁴ Even Spratlin's translation of Juan Latino, long out of print, can be difficult to locate. This is unfortunate, because the Spanish comedia’s sustained examination of blackness in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries merits more extensive critical attention. In making this suggestion I do not wish to gloss over the problematic nature of representations of blackness in the Spanish comedia. Although the historical Juan Latino was black, the two plays about black protagonists that I discuss here – Juan Latino and El valiente negro en Flandes – were written by white men. Many representations of blackness on early modern Spanish stages are deeply racist, particularly short interludes or entremeses that display parodic versions of black speech (habla de negros) and lampoon black African life in early modern Spain. Even the heroic achievements of black protagonists in the comedia are framed as service to a white Spanish nation in ways that implicitly (and at times explicitly) naturalize a connection between blackness and enslavement.

Nonetheless, these Spanish plays offer a series of complex representations of blackness and whiteness in relation to slavery and nation. In that regard, they have a great deal to teach us about early modern constructions of race, particularly when read alongside more frequently studied plays such as Othello. For instance (to give one brief example), the persistent rhetoric linking the heroic service of black protagonists with slavery in the Spanish comedia may allow us to read Othello’s preoccupation with service as a gesture towards the rise of racialized slavery. Additionally, seemingly uncontroversial representations of interracial marriage on the early modern Spanish stage force us to register the cultural specificity of English drama's preoccupation with using blackness as a sign of white women's sexual deviance, whether by pairing fair villainesses with black lovers (e.g. Aaron in Titus Andronicus or Eleazar in Lust's Dominion) or with black female servants (e.g. Zanche in The White Devil). We may even be able, as Nicholas R. Jones argues in a new monograph, to recover traces of early modern black experience in these Spanish plays as we cannot in English plays from the same period. Jones argues that close readings of the stage tradition of “black talk” or habla de negros can “render legible the voices and experiences of black Africans in fundamental ways that demand our attention.”Footnote ¹⁵ Whether we set our sights on delineating the workings of white supremacy or on recovering traces of black voices, our understanding of early modern representations of race will be greatly enriched if we look beyond Othello to its many Spanish counterparts.

For a brief moment in the 1920s–1940s, representations of blackness in early modern Spain emerged as an important part of a black cosmopolitan, diasporic history in conjunction with a movement for transnational solidarity in the fight against fascism. In this context, early modern Spanish plays with black protagonists were briefly held up for scrutiny; since then, they have largely disappeared from the public eye. Nonetheless, particularly in our current bleak historical moment, the radical possibilities evoked by scholars in the US in the first half of the twentieth century as they wrote about representations of blackness in early modern Spain may offer us a productive model for our own scholarship. And as our government today turns increasingly towards a stifling nationalism and isolationism, attending to this and other histories of solidarity across national and linguistic boundaries becomes particularly pressing.