The Art of Dancing in Seventeenth-Century Spain includes a transcription of the Spanish text, a translation of that text into English, and extensive commentary that contextualizes the dancing in light of European, particularly Spanish, dance, society, culture, and history."--BOOK JACKET.

V. 1. History and background, music and dance -- v. 2. Musical transcriptions -- v. 3. The notes in Spanish and other languages from the sources.

This Handbook asks how competition affects the presentation and experience of dance.

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.

In this groundbreaking study, Diana Berruezo-Sánchez recovers key chapters in the history of Afro-Iberian diasporas by exploring the literary contributions and life experiences of black African communities and individuals in early modern Spain. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, international trade involving chattel slavery led to significant populations of enslaved, free(d), and half-manumitted black African women, men, and children in the Iberian Peninsula. These demographic changes transformed Spain's urban and social landscapes. In exploring Spain's role in the transatlantic slave trade and its effects on cultural forms of the period, Berruezo-Sánchez examines a broad range of texts and unearths new documents relating to black African poets, performers, and black confraternities. Her discoveries evince the broad yet largely disregarded literary and artistic impact of the African diaspora in early modern Spain, expanding the scope of linguistic practices beyond habla de negros and creating space for early modern black poets in the Spanish literary canon. These textual sources challenge established understandings of black Africans and black African history in early modern Spain. They show how black Africans exerted significant cultural agency by collectively contributing to and shaping the literary texts of the period, including those of the popular genre villancicos de negros, and by developing artistic traditions as musicians, dancers, and poets. As both creators and consumers of cultural forms, black African men and women navigated a restrictive, coercive slave society yet negotiated their own physical and cultural spaces.

The language of the body is central to the study of flamenco. From the records of the Inquisition, to 16th century literature, to European travel diaries, the Spanish dancer beguiles and fascinates. The word flamenco evokes the image of a sensuous and rebellious woman--the bailaora --whose movements seduce the audience, only to reject their attention with a stomp of defiance. The dancer's body is an agent of ideological resistance, conveying a conflicting desire for subjectivity and autonomy and implying deeply held ideas about history, national identity, femininity and masculinity. This collection of new essays provides an overview of flamenco scholarship, illuminating flamenco's narrative and chronology and addressing some common misconceptions. The contributors offer fresh perspectives on age-old themes and suggest new paradigms for flamenco as a cultural practice. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Transatlantic Malagueñas and Zapateados is an exploration of two fandango dances, recording the circulations of people, imagery, music, and dance across what were once the Spanish and Portuguese Empires. Although these dance-musics seem to be mirror images, the unbreachable space between them reflects the political fault-lines along which nineteenth-century musical populism and folkloric nationalism extend into present-day debates about globalization, immigration, neoliberalism, and neofascism. If malagueñas are a fantastic incarnation of Spanishness, caught like a fly in amber by their anachronistic references to a fraught imperial past, noisy and raucous zapateado dances cut toward the future. Inherently marked by European conventions of zapatos (shoes), zapateados are nonetheless shaped by Africanist and Native American footwork traditions. In these Afro-Indigenous mestizajes, not only are European aesthetic values reordered and resignified, but the Catholic catechism which indoctrinated the New World yields to alternate spiritual systems springing out of a culture of resistance to European domination.