Sonidos Negros: On the Blackness of Flamenco

K. Meira Goldberg

Nov. 2018 · Oxford University Press

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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.

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K. Meira Goldberg is a flamenco performer, teacher, choreographer and historian. She teaches at Fashion Institute of Technology and is Scholar in Residence at the Foundation for Iberian Music at the CUNY Grad Center. She has taught and guest lectured at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, Flamenco Festival International in Albuquerque, Ballet Hispanico, Bryn Mawr, Princeton, Duke, Juilliard, The New School, and Smith College.