«Negro poeta debió de ser el que tan negro romance hizo»: ¿poetas negros en el Siglo de Oro?

Abstract

The Golden Age coincides with the most dreadful forced migration in early modern history: African slavery. According to the most recent figures, 12.5 million enslaved Africans were boarded for the Americas between 1500-1867 (Richardson and Ribeiro da Silva, 2015). The city of Seville in Spain was particularly relevant in the slave trade, as one of the main transfer sites. From 1490 to 1600, many Africans enslaved in the Gulf of Guinea were shipped to Seville, as well as Lisbon, and then later to America, or remained in Europe as domestic and household slaves. The number of sub-Saharan Africans in Seville fluctuated over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and despite being an unknown part of our history, it had an important cultural impact. In fact, the literary and pictorial impact in the Spanish Golden Age has not received sufficient scholarly attention, with the exception being that of studies on the stereotypical representations of black Africans in literary texts, particularly in Golden Age drama. This article explores this topic further and investigates the oral production of enslaved black Africans in Spain. It uncovers several indirect references of their oral tradition, particularly sourced from the black brotherhoods widely spread at the time. Also, it examines a significant number of references to black people as poets, that is, as composers of lyrics and songs. The data collected here reevaluates the cultural agency of black Africans in the literary history of the Golden Age.