Reviewed by:

• Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race by Noémie Ndiaye
• Baltasar Fra-Molinero (bio)

Scripts of Blackness puts English, French, and Spanish early modern literatures in conversation with each other. Its comparatist method showcases the history of the African diaspora in each country's colonial development. Noémie Ndiaye explores what she calls "the invention of performative blackness" (6) in early modern Europe by paying attention to archival material of words and images that reveals a common narrative: blackness becomes transnational and intercolonial, as she calls it. Early modern slavery itself was the first transnational institution in the Atlantic world, and blackness was its embodiment.

The introductory chapter analyzes the lexicogical commonalities of the word race in English, Spanish and French. Early modern dictionaries and vocabularies show how the word moved from meaning social degree and religious adscription to add distinction of people by phenotype. Blackness became a race, a visible marker of pre-established difference that justifies domination. The chapter then establishes the genesis of performative blackness in the Iberian Peninsula, where the main cities of Spain and Portugal contained the largest communities of black Africans. Literary texts as early as the fifteenth century give evidence of the creation of a canon to represent blackness that includes speech, music, and dance. The introduction also explores research methodologies that justify the study of black representations in countries where there was no significant black population (France, England) but where there was a growing interest in representing blackness, especially in the form of dancing among aristocrats in what the author sees as early examples of colonial fantasies. Representing blackness in court balls expressed a desire for trans-Atlantic empire. The representation of blackness by whites was staged as spectacle and as a mainstay of white supremacy. The author addresses the need to study these processes, as today white supremacy and anti-Black racism are a global pandemic and a threat to humanity. Scripts of Blackness establishes historical distinctions in the various processes by which representations of blackness came into being. With the onset of the Atlantic slave trade, blackness became a performance in early modern European courts. Racial impersonation took the form of black-up (created after make-up, cosmetic blackness), blackspeak (acoustic blackness) and dance (kinetic blackness). Other theoretical concepts are added in the analysis of black performance, including racecraft, which encompasses all forms of black performance; and Africanese, or the use of incomprehensible gibberish to indicate foreign blackness. Such concepts allow the reader to navigate with a common theoretical language the [End Page 292] performative cultures of Spain, France, and England from the sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth century.

Chapter 1's recounting of the evolution of devil images into objects of consumption in Spain—and how this process informed the development of the slave trade—is accompanied by overwhelming textual evidence. Meanwhile, early modern French and English cultural practices continued the medieval association of blackness to religious negativity. The chapter historicizes the differences between the three countries as their relation to trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism followed different temporal spans. It also demonstrates that scripts of blackness circulated between the three countries.

Black-up or cosmetic blackness is explored in chapter 2 through the irrepresentability of female blackness, that is, the impossibility of articulating Black women's rape and their labor, which receives a novel treatment under the rubric of oblique aesthetics. This aesthetic scripted Afro-diasporic women into a performative invisibility that absconds white desire and widespread rape in the colonies. The purpose of the chapter is to render Afro-diasporic women visible in the very performative texts that exclude them. The chapter analyzes three different types of black script by displaying an impressive array of scholarship on palace ballet dances in France. The exclusion of Black women from the geometric dance represents a disavowal of white desire for them. The other important point in this chapter is the exclusionary take on the...

审阅者：

• 《黑人的剧本：早期现代表演文化和种族的形成》作者：诺埃米·恩迪亚耶(Noémie Ndiaye)
• 巴尔塔萨尔·弗拉-莫利内罗（简介）

《黑人剧本》将英语、法语和西班牙语的早期现代文学相互对话。其比较主义方法展示了非洲侨民在各国殖民发展中的历史。诺埃米·恩迪亚耶（Noémie Ndiaye）通过关注揭示了一个共同叙事的文字和图像档案材料，探索了她所说的现代早期欧洲“表演性黑人的发明”（6）：正如她所说，黑人变得跨国和跨殖民。早期现代奴隶制本身就是大西洋世界第一个跨国制度，黑人就是它的体现。

介绍性章节分析了英语、西班牙语和法语中“race”一词的词汇共性。早期现代词典和词汇显示了这个词如何从社会程度和宗教归属的含义转变为通过表型来区分人。黑人变成了一种种族，一种既定差异的明显标志，为统治提供了正当理由。然后，本章确立了伊比利亚半岛表演性黑人的起源，西班牙和葡萄牙的主要城市拥有最大的非洲黑人社区。早在十五世纪的文学文本就证明了代表黑人的经典的创造，其中包括演讲、音乐和舞蹈。引言还探讨了研究方法论，这些方法论证明了在没有大量黑人人口的国家（法国、英国）对黑人代表性的研究是合理的，但在这些国家，人们对代表黑人的兴趣日益浓厚，尤其是以贵族之间的舞蹈形式。被视为殖民幻想的早期例子。在宫廷舞会上代表黑人表达了对跨大西洋帝国的渴望。白人对黑人的再现被上演为奇观，并成为白人至上的支柱。作者指出有必要研究这些过程，因为今天白人至上和反黑人种族主义是全球流行病，对人类构成威胁。《黑人脚本》在黑人表征产生的各种过程中建立了历史区别。随着大西洋奴隶贸易的开始，黑人成为近代早期欧洲宫廷中的一种表演。种族模仿的形式包括黑化（化妆后创造的、化妆黑化）、黑话（声学黑化）和舞蹈（动能黑化）。在对黑人表现的分析中还添加了其他理论概念，包括赛车运动，它涵盖了黑人表现的所有形式；和非洲人，或者使用难以理解的胡言乱语来表明外国黑人。这些概念使读者能够用一种共同的理论语言来了解16 世纪到 17 世纪末西班牙、法国和英国的表演文化[完第 292 页] 。

第一章叙述了魔鬼图像在西班牙如何演变为消费对象，以及这一过程如何影响奴隶贸易的发展，并附有压倒性的文字证据。与此同时，近代早期的法国和英国文化习俗延续了中世纪黑人与宗教消极情绪的联系。本章将这三个国家之间的差异历史化，因为它们与跨大西洋奴隶制和殖民主义的关系遵循不同的时间跨度。它还表明黑色文字在这三个国家之间流传。

第二章通过女性黑人的不可再现性来探讨黑人或化妆品上的黑人，即无法阐明黑人妇女的强奸及其劳动，这在倾斜美学的标题下得到了新颖的处理。这种美学将非洲裔散居国外的女性变成了一种表演性的隐形人，逃避了白人的欲望和殖民地广泛的强奸。本章的目的是让非裔散居国外的妇女在排除她们的表演性文本中变得可见。本章通过展示一系列关于法国宫廷芭蕾舞的令人印象深刻的学术成果，分析了三种不同类型的黑色文字。将黑人女性排除在几何舞蹈之外代表着白人对她们的欲望的否认。本章的另一个重要点是对……的排除性看法。