Beyond Babel
Translations of Blackness in Colonial Peru and New Granada

Examines how black intermediaries in colonial Spanish America influenced written portrayals of virtuous and beautiful blackness.

Larissa Brewer-García (Author)

9781108493000, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 6 August 2020

321 pages
24 x 16 x 2.6 cm, 0.62 kg

'Beyond Babel is an excellent read, and via extensive archival research, comparative literature, and visual culture study, Brewer-García sheds light on the role of Black intermediaries in shaping the early modern world.' Elena Fitzpatrick Sifford, Hispanic American Historical Review

In seventeenth-century Spanish America, black linguistic interpreters and spiritual intermediaries played key roles in the production of writings about black men and women. Focusing on the African diaspora in Peru and the southern continental Caribbean, Larissa Brewer-García uncovers long-ignored or lost archival materials describing the experiences of black Christians in the transatlantic slave trade and the colonial societies where they arrived. Brewer-García's analysis of these materials shows that black intermediaries bridged divisions among the populations implicated in the slave trade, exerting influence over colonial Spanish American writings and emerging racial hierarchies in the Atlantic world. The translated portrayals of blackness composed by these intermediaries stood in stark contrast to the pejorative stereotypes common in literary and legal texts of the period. Brewer-García reconstructs the context of those translations and traces the contours and consequences of their notions of blackness, which were characterized by physical beauty and spiritual virtue.

Introduction: Linguistic and Spiritual Mediations in the Earlier
Black Atlantic
1. Black Types between Renaissance Humanism and Iberian Counter Reformation Theology
2. The Transatlantic Slave Trade and Spanish American Missionary Translation Policy
3. The Mediations of Black Interpreters in Colonial Cartagena de Indias
4. Conversion and the Making of Blackness in Colonial Cartagena de Indias
5. Salvation and the Making Blackness in Colonial Lima: Úrsula de Jesús.

Subject Areas: History of the Americas [HBJK], History [HB], Humanities [H]