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.

Responding to recent evolutions in the fields of dance and religious and secular studies, The Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance documents and celebrates the significant impact of Jewish identity on a variety of communities and the dance world writ large. Focusing on North America, Europe, and Israel in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this Handbook highlights the sometimes surprising, often hidden and overlooked Jewish resonances within a range of styles from modern and postmodern dance to folk dance and flamenco. Privileging the historically marginalized voices of scholars, performers, and instructors the Handbook considers the powerful role of dance in addressing difference, such as between American and Israeli Jewish communities. In the process, contributors advocate values of social justice, like Tikkun Olam (repair of the world), debate, and humor, exploring the fascinating and potentially uncomfortable contradictions and ambiguities that characterize this robust area of research.

Popular Music in Spanish Cinema analyses the aesthetics and stylistic development of soundtracks from national productions, considering how political instability and cultural diversity in Spain determined the ways of making art and managing culture. As a pioneering study in this field, the chronologically structured approach of this book provides readers with a complete overview of Spanish music and connects it to the complex historical events that conditioned Spanish culture throughout the 20th century to the present day, from the Second Republic, the Spanish Civil war, and the dictatorship through to democracy. The book enables an understanding of the relationships between the recording and film production industries, the construction of collective imagination, the formulation of new stereotypes, semiotic meanings within film music and the musical exchanges between national and international cinema. This volume is an essential read for students and academics in the field of musicology, ethnomusicology and history as well as those interested in the study of diverse musical styles such as copla, zarzuela, flamenco, jazz, foxtrot, pop and rock and how they have been used in Spanish films throughout history.

Carmen in Diaspora is a cultural history of Carmen adaptations set in African diasporic contexts. It explores the phenomenon of the connection between the story of Carmen, which originally appeared in Prosper Mérimée's eponymous 1845 novella and came to prominence through Georges Bizet's 1875 opera, with prolific popular recreations in African diasporic settings. The source texts for Carmen not only suggest nineteenth-century French negotiations of Blackness via the Romani community, but also provide provocative frameworks through which to examine conceptions of Black womanhood and self-determination in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Through analyses of Mérimée and Bizet, the Harlem Renaissance novels The Blacker the Berry (1929), Banjo (1929), and Romance in Marseille (2020); the U.S. movie musicals Carmen Jones (1954) and Carmen: A Hip Hopera (2001); the Senegalese and South African feature films Karmen Geï (2001) and U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (2005), respectively; and the Cuban-set stage musical Carmen la Cubana (2016), Carmen in Diaspora examines how these works illuminate the cultural currents of the nineteenth-century European context in which the character was born. The book also interrogates social categories, particularly gender, race, and sexuality, in contemporary Europe, North America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Carmen is Diaspora is an adaptation study that emphasizes connections formed through the transposition rather than imposition of European culture as it considers how artists have brought - and continue to bring - new energy, vision, and life to the story of opera's most famous character.

This collection of new essays explores the many ways in which writing relates to corporeality and how the two work together to create, resist or mark the body of the "Other." Contributors draw on varied backgrounds to examine different movement practices. They focus on movement as a meaning-making process, including the choreographic act of writing. The challenges faced by marginalized bodies are discussed, along with the ability of a body to question, contest and re-write historical narratives.

This collection of essays poses a series of questions revolving around nonsense, cacophony, queerness, race, and the dancing body. How can flamenco, as a diasporic complex of performance and communities of practice frictionally and critically bound to the complexities of Spanish history, illuminate theories of race and identity in performance? How can we posit, and argue for, genealogical relationships within and between genres across the vast expanses of the African—and Roma—diaspora? Neither are the essays presented here limited to flamenco, nor, consequently, are the responses to these questions reduced to this topic. What all the contributions here do share is the wish to come together, across disciplines and subject areas, within the academy and without, in the whirling, raucous, and messy spaces where the body is free—to celebrate its questioning, as well as the depths of the wisdom and knowledge it holds and sometimes reveals.

In this volume, Nicholas R. Jones analyzes white appropriations of black African voices in Spanish theater from the 1500s through the 1700s, when the performance of Africanized Castilian, commonly referred to as habla de negros (black speech), was in vogue. Focusing on Spanish Golden Age theater and performative poetry from authors such as Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Rueda, and Rodrigo de Reinosa, Jones makes a strong case for revising the belief, long held by literary critics and linguists, that white appropriations and representations of habla de negros language are “racist buffoonery” or stereotype. Instead, Jones shows black characters who laugh, sing, and shout, ultimately combating the violent desire of white supremacy. By placing early modern Iberia in conversation with discourses on African diaspora studies, Jones showcases how black Africans and their descendants who built communities in early modern Spain were rendered legible in performative literary texts. Accessibly written and theoretically sophisticated, Jones’s groundbreaking study elucidates the ways that habla de negros animated black Africans’ agency, empowered their resistance, and highlighted their African cultural retentions. This must-read book on identity building, performance, and race will captivate audiences across disciplines.