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Blackening European Modernities/Dis-covering An-Other Europe:

Toward a Genealogy of Afro-Hispanic Difference

Agustin Lao-Montes
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Looking at modern histories through the lens of Afro-Hispanic difference should imply

an epistemic shift in the ways we construct Europe as a geo-historical category and

furthermore in how we conceptualize modernity itself. The very notion of modernity

tends to be differentially signified in relation to its spatio-temporal referents, and without

a necessary correspondence of its meanings as a historical era, a set of political forms and

economic achievements, a tradition of philosophical discourse, or a cluster of cultural

logics. In spite of these complexities and confusions, modernity is generally assumed to

be of European origin, linked to an imaginary we call western civilization, and dated

between the enlightenment and the industrial revolution.

In contrast, I will argue that theorizing from the geo-historic and epistemic location of

Afro-Hispanic difference could imply a radical break with the episteme that produce

these conventional concepts of both Europe and modernity. First it means a change in the

spatio-temporal matrix through which we understand modern political-economies,

empires, legalities, cultures, social movements, and subjectivities, tracing back all of

these modern forms and formations to the crucial period that runs between what Abu-

Lughod calls the 13th Century world-system to Braudel’s long 16th Century (1450-1650).

It also means revisiting the very idea of Europe in relation to its internal borders and

external determinants, as we shall see.

We analyze capitalist modernity as a complex, contradictory, and shifting historical

totality that we represent as the modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system. Here

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we cannot minimally engage the debates on the origins of world capitalism and the rise of

Europe to world power, but should state that the emergence in 1492 of the Atlantic

system as the epicenter of a long-term process of globalization mark the beginnings of the

modern era. One of my main contentions is that the configuration in 1492 of Spain as the

first Absolutist state and as the first trans-territorial overseas empire, are pillars in the

constitution of the historical system that we call capitalist modernity. In 1492 the fall of

Muslim Granada to Christian forces opened the gates for the formation of the first

European central state with a standing army that eventually along with the imposition of

the Castilian grammar of Nebrija to its territory and the organization of the inquisition as

a state apparatus of surveillance and coercion, constitute the first forms of the modern

state. In the same vein, the organization of a trans-territorial overseas empire with novel

modes of organization of production and exploitation of labor (the encomienda and

plantation slavery), and the corresponding emergence of allegedly universal schemas of

human classification and stratification (namely the rise of racial categories such as

“Indio”, “Negro”, y “Mestizo”), sat the stage for the structuration of new global

constellations of power and knowledge.

It is this world-historical pattern of power that began to be configured in 1492 and

persist until today in spite of all the significant changes and ruptures in world-history that

Anibal Quijano conceptualizes with the notion of the coloniality of power. To put it in a

nutshell the concept of the coloniality of power serves as a key theoretical representation

of a complex and dynamic entanglement of processes of domination, hegemomy, and

resistance that compose the longue duree of modern constellations of power. It can be

summarized as the opening of a world-historical space characterized by four main modes

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of domination: capitalism, racism, imperialism, and patriarchy, which frame key global

political-economic, geo-political, ethno-racial, gender, sexual, civilizational, cultural, and

epistemic hierarchies. A crucial component of this Eurocentered process of globalization

is the historical production of modern/colonial categories of memory, space, visuality,

identity, subjectivity, and embodiment (both political and individual bodies). In this

register, modern racial discourse is a historical product of a convergence of empire-

building, the rise of world capitalism, and the corresponding civilizational and legal

modes of classification and stratification that emerged at the Iberian Peninsula in the long

sixteenth century. Thus, one of our arguments here is that modern categories of

peoplehood (namely race, ethnicity, and nationality) owe much to the extension a

Mediterranean contact zone centered on the Al-Andalus region of the Iberian Peninsula to

the trans-Atlantic contact zone that articulated Europe, Africa, and the Americas in the

aftermath of 1492.

The concept of contact zone as coined by Mary Louise Pratt signifies an imperial region

of uneven developments and unequal exchanges of wealth and power but also of complex

and reciprocal processes of transculturation. In the inter-regional system that composed

the 13th Century world-system that included what today we call Europe, North Africa,

part of Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, East Asia, and the Ottoman Empire, the Al-

Andalus region that today is Southern Spain was one of the epicenters of the Islamic

world. A long history of wars between Islam and Christianity and the variety of cultures

had made it into a rich contact zone for articulations and negotiations of identity and

difference. The so-called reconquest war is a Spanish nationalist fallacy that reduces

close to eight centuries of violent conflict over land, cultural and religious hegemony, to
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an epic of recovery of a nation that did not exist before its invention in modernity. But

several hundred years of Islamic rule and Christian contestation and its location in-

between historic worlds (e.g., North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Iberia) made the Al-

Andalus into a multicultural space wherein modern racial discourse will be rehearse.

After the rise of Christian hegemony in the 13th Century, a faith-based proto-racial

discourse emerged in which conversion to Christianity could result in getting a certificate

of “purity of blood”. The use of a corporeal-biological analogy along with the cultural-

religious criteria pointed toward the match of natural and cultural elements in modern

racial discourse. But such racial imaginary and its universal schemes of classification and

stratification will not be fleshed-out and developed until the so-called discovery of the

Americas in 1492 which came along the mass expulsion of Arabic Moors and Zephardic

Jews from the newly born Spanish state as we already noticed.

Modernity was invented in the Caribbean as put by philosopher Enrique Dussel, but in

a dialectical relation with Iberia as suggested in his concept of transmodernity. Indeed,

we should talk about the simultaneous invention of the Americas, Africa, and Europe, as

geo-historical categories and as such as continents, civilizations, and as racialized spaces.

It is within this process of co-production of modernity in the world-historical time-space

that simultaneously produced Africa, Europe, and the Americas, that we should locate

Juan Latino the principal character of our narrative.

The approximate dates of Juan Latino are between his birth circa 1518 until his death in

1596 or 1597. Hence his times are mark by the European Renaissance and the beginnings

of the conquest of the Americas and the institution of chattel slavery. This early modern

moment should also be characterized by the making of occidentalist ideologies as

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expressed in the idea of the Americas as the West Indies (or the future of Europe), in the

coining of the legal concept of “rights of peoples” as articulated in the debate between

Las Casas and Sepulveda about the humanity and legal rights of Amerindians, and in the

creation of universal classifications based on concepts of race and civilization as

represented in various versions of the great chain of being. Thus, when Juan Latino self-

identified as been of Ethiopian origin he was functioning from within and somehow

against such a racialized civilizational divide, as we shall see.

Juan Latino was submitted to slavery as a child since he was born either in Africa or

Spain (given that his place of birth is contested). Very early in his life he became a slave

of Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordoba, Duke of Sessa who resided in Baena, Spain. In 1530

they moved to Granada where in light of his extraordinary intellectual talents Juan was

allow to attend Latin grammar classes with his owner up to the university level. At the

University of Granada Juan obtained the equivalent to a bachelor degree in Latin

Grammar in 1546, becoming a master of the field in 1556. In this context he studied with

the prominent Latin grammarian Pedro de Motta and became a protégée of Granada’s

Archbishop Pedro Guerrero. He eventually was appointed as professor of Latin grammar

at the University and got married with Ana Carleval who was the daughter of the

administrator of the estate of the Duke de Sessa who ended emancipating Juan from his

slave status. Juan Latino eventually came to be a laureate poet of the city of Granada, and

a prominent professor and scholar who published various books of poetry and essays. His

marriage with a white woman from the aristocracy and his mastery of the highest levels

of literacy in a time in which reason and humanity itself was founded on been a man of

letters, de fact granted Juan Latino what critic Jose Piedra characterize nowadays as
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literary whiteness. However, he remained named in the next generation by writers of the

Spanish Golden Age as “El Negro Juan Latino” and kept identifying himself as an

Ethiopian Black. Let’s examine the content and implications of these historical clues.

Originally named Juan de Sessa, he renamed as Latino instead of the pejorative Ladino

in light of having achieved the highest levels of literacy in both Castilian and Latin. In

fact, in an epigraph at the beginning of Don Quixote Cervantes states:

Pues al cielo no le pluere

que saliese tan ladino

como el negro Juan Latino

hablar Latines rehúso

(DQ 1: 27)

“Since Heaven did not want me to be as well spoken as black Juan Latino, I prefer not to

speak all that Latin stuff.” Here what is salient is that Cervantes, a contemporary of Juan

Latino, recognizes him for his erudition at the same time that labels Juan as “el negro”

while enunciating a defense of the Castilian vernacular. But for Juan Latino, who was

marked by the imperial gaze on his dark body, by the existential modern condition of

racial difference that Fanon signified as “the fact of blackness”, mastery of latin became a

source of symbolic capital, an intellectual tool of power. In an address to King Philip II,

that Juan Latino published in the book Austrias Carmen Juan Latino wrote:

New things want a new poet at the service of kings./ This victory at sea has not reached /
your ears yet, Sire. This writer was not born in these parts of the world / His name is
Latinus, and he came from the lands of Ethiopia / to sing the deeds of Juan de Austria
with the admirable art of poetry. / Unconquered Philip, on his bended knee this singer
asks / to be your brother’s poet. / If the wars of the Austriad make the poet famous,/ the
poet’s blackness will make Don Juan a phoenix.
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What is remarkable about this stanza is the expression of what DuBois analyzes as double

consciousness, as articulated in how Juan Latino self-identifies as a black poet coming

from the lands of Ethiopia while he declared his loyalty to the Spanish monarchy and the

empire of Philip II. I contend that in this text we have the first written statement from an

Afro-diasporic subject who claims a relation with Africa while identifying as subject-

citizen of a European state and western culture, but in search of equality, hence the

request “to be your brother poet”. This is clearly demonstrated in another stanza where

Juan Latino writes:

Because if my black face displeases your ministers, oh king, a white one is not pleasant
either among the Ethiopians. Anyone visiting the parts of the East will not be held in
esteem if he looks white. Noblemen there are all black, and so is their king.

Writing in a time in which the denial of African humanity was common sense within

the rising occidentalist discourses, this claim of black nobility, together with the

denunciation of racist displeasure with the black face along with the placing of African

lack of esteem toward white looks in the same plane, was a clear act of transgression.

This begs the question of why Juan Latino was not declared persona non grata or

destituted from professorship. Here comes to surface some other features that account for

the specificity of Afro-Hispanic difference. The first is that black bodies and African

subjects had inhabited the Iberian Peninsula for hundred of years so they were more

familiar there that in the rest of Europe. A more substantive consideration is that Afro-

Hispanics, played different roles in the Spanish empire since its very inception. They

accompanied Columbus in his trips to the new world and eventually served as cultural

mediators and translators between Europeans, Amerindians, and African captives.

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In a similar fashion, Juan Latino lived in Granada in a time in which Spanish imperial

power was contested in its interior front. He lived through what is known as the 1568 War

of Alpujarras, a revolt by Moriscos of Islamic descent against the Spanish Catholic state.

Juan Latino went through pains to establish his difference as a Black Catholic of

Ethiopian Christian descent, from North Africans of Islamic faith and/or descent. In

performing this task he used the same occidentalist racial logics that he had partly

transgressed. His deeper project was to take Catholic universalism to its ultimate

consequences by claiming inclusion for Ethiopians who represented African Christianity

against Islam, and establishing the humanity of blacks as people of letters and therefore

as the antithesis of the slave. Taking into account that in the ideology of the Renaissance

humanity and reason were established on the basis of literacy and dominion of a Christian

(namely a European) language, becoming a grammarian became a strategy for

humanization and a tool of empowerment for Juan Latino. But Juan Latino’s particular

Afro-diasporic/Afro-Hispanic subjectivity was quite distinct from the locations and

experiences of African slaves both in the Americas and in Europe. His claim was not to

overthrow the imperial regime of slavery itself (as it would be the aims of T’oussaint

L’Overture and Olaudah Equiano in the 18th Century) but to transform the empire from

within with the inclusion of African Christians within imperial forms of citizenship. His

contradictory social location within the empire framed a fragmented racial consciousness

of a subject that at the same time who affirmed his Africanity and his Blackness defended

the universalist project of the Spanish Catholic empire. Furthermore, a strong anti-Islamic

and anti-Turkish edge also revealed an Orientalist ideology that was sustained by an

Occidentalist commitment to Latin letters and Renaissance humanism. In this sense, Juan
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Latino’s Europe was a blackened version of early modern Occidentalism, a sort of

internal narrative of what Walter Mignolo calls the darker side of the Renaissance. In

interpreting his take on the dialectic of freedom and slavery, an important consideration

may be that been located at the heart of Empire in Europe, Juan Latino did not have direct

contact with the everyday terror of chattel slavery. His own idea of Africa was somehow

abstract and mediated by his location as an elite intellectual in Granada which may partly

explain his sharp distinction between North Africa and Ethiopia and the metonymic

reduction of Africa to Christendom as embodied in Ethiopia.

Now, what are some of the points of reflection for our current project of Black

European Studies, that we can infer from this rich and complex story of an Afro-diasporic

intellectual who played quite central roles in early modern Europe? What politics of

memory are at stake? What values can we extrapolate from the history of Juan Latino for

a genealogy of Black Europeans in modernity? In what remains of my time, I will expore

some of these quests and their implications to develop an Afro-diasporic perspective as a

mode of decolonial critique. In search of economy of words and time, I will lay-out three

set of arguments.

The first set of contentions can be summarize by arguing that stories such as Juan

Latino’s allow us to unsettle hegemonic narratives of Europe and to rethink Europe from

the standpoint of its margins and internal others. As stated before, engaging the

problematic of modernity from the perspective of the early modern Spanish empire

implies a genealogy of the modern that challenges the convention of equating it with the

enlightenment. This move itself defies the marginalization of Mediterranean southern

Europe in hegemonic Occidentalist narratives wherein the so-called west is the “heart of
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Europe” and the cunning of civilization to paraphrase Hegel. Remembering and

recognizing that Juan Latino played a key role at the same time that remained relatively

marginal in the first modern empire, means writing Afro-Hispanic difference within the

central narrative not only of the Hispanic world but of modernity itself. For instance, in

addition to the reference in Don Quixote, Diego Ximenes de Enciso wrote a play for “El

Negro Juan Latino” that could be considered the first literary text dedicated to a black

subject by a white European author. This play, along with featuring of Juan Latino and his

wife Ana Carleval in Lope de Vega’s La Dama Boba register Black European subjects

within the theatre and literature of the Spanish Golden Age. A more general implication

will be the resignification of Spain and Europe that will entail a challenge to the very

ideology of the west, now seen through the lens of its hidden and forgotten domestic

others, internal borders, and European peripheries. For instance, hegemonic narratives of

Europe tend to render Ireland relatively invisible or to confine her to the margins of the

British world. In opposition to this, Irish postcolonial theory articulates a challenge from

within to Eurocentric/Occidentalist narratives of European and modern history and self,

with an intend and effect of deconstructing and reconstructing the very concept of

Europe. One of my main contentions here is that a critical Black European Studies have

this potential decolonial effect to unsettle Eurocentric notions of Europe while

problematizing and resignifying the very idea of Europe. This kind of critical endeavor

will also imply a globalization of European Studies, a mundializacion (as in Spanish and

French) of our understanding of Europe as a world-region and as a geo-historical/geo-

cultural category. This hermeneutical strategy involves reading the inscription of its

others (both internal and external) into the history, culture, and identity of Europe. In this
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vein, an Afro-diasporic world-historical perspective on Europe will entail not only

registering and recognizing the significance of Afro-descendants (and blacks in general)

throughout European history, but also the crucial influence of Africa and its diaspora in

the historical formations and transformations of the region, let’s say to use shorthand

from the constitutive character of the institution of chattel slavery for the rise of the

Eurocentered capitalist modernity in the long 16th Century, to the centrality of the 18th and

19th Century Haitian Revolution and Abolitionist Movement, and the U.S. Black Freedom

Movement in the 1960s and 70s for the theory and praxis of modern democracy and for

European polities and social movements in particular. Hence, what I am suggesting here

is not simply to provintialize Europe’s false claim of universality that is based on a given

particular as proposed by Dipesh Chakrabarty, but to de-provintialize and globalize

Europe, a critical engagement to be perform from the standpoint of its Afro-diasporic

subjects both inside and outside its immediate spatial configurations.

The second set of questions I am bringing to the table can be place under the rubric of

Subaltern Studies and in relation to what some of us call Subaltern Modernities. The

concept itself imply that there are other forms of modernity besides the western version

that Dussel characterizes by “the management of centrality” in opposition to trans-

modernity that denotes a plurality of historical spaces that are intertwined in complex

ways. To return to the example of the Haitian Revolution, it is conventionally interpreted

as a by-product of the French Revolution, but a more nuanced reading will reveal how the

slave revolt in Saint Domingue changed the course of the French Revolution, but more so

how this “unthinkable event” in the Occidentalist imaginary (as put by Michel Trouillout)

was not only led by Black Jacobins like T’Oussaint L’Overture (to use CLR James’
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expression), but also by maroon band leaders and voodoo priests like Broukman and

Makandal who remained altogether outside the republic of letters. Such subaltern

modernities forged translocal undercurrents of slave rebellion that ran from the U.S.

South, to Brazil, Colombia, and Cuba. This example brings to surface the need to

distinguish between different forms and levels of subalternity, an issue that is revealed by

the contradictory locations of Juan Latino within the Spanish empire. In fact, we can

identify two currents of Afro-diasporic thought, culture, and politics, one literate and able

to master the master’s discourse (we can call this Caliban’s Reason) and another one not

necessarily literate and more grounded on Afro-diasporic vernacular cultures (we can call

this Subaltern Reason). Arguably, the antinomies of Juan Latino as an elite black placed

at the heart of whiteness, exemplify some of the contradictions and dilemmas of Afro-

European intellectuals of been both inside and outside and of engaging in critique of

western regimes of power and knowledge with the discursive categories of the west.

To end this part I will like to raise the question of continuity of anti-Islamic and racist

discourses in today’s Spain. Even though the Spanish empire was finally dismantled as a

political-economic apparatus with the Spanish-Cuban-American-Filipino War of 1898, it

was quickly ideologically reconfigured as a civilization, linguistic, and racial community,

as summarized in the imperial maxim La Raza Hispana. The corresponding imperial

discourse of Hispanophilia was manifest in two critical junctures for this construction of

the Spanish nation and self as imperial, the 500 years of the so-called discovery in 1992,

and the 100 years of what was remembered with nostalgia for the loss empire in 1998.

Today, when Spain serves as a southern border and entry gate for North Africans and

Sub-Saharan Africans, there is a revival of anti-Islamic/anti-Moor discourse and violence.

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The revival of racial nationalism comes along with an exclusionary definition of Europe

that is entirely oblivious of the Islamic and African past and remainings especially of

southern Spain. Anti-Arab/Anti-Islamic racism is so fierce that research shows how its

manifestations are more violent that the xenophonic racism against South American and

Hispanic Caribbean immigrants who are negatively label as Sudacas. Research shows

that even immigrants from the Dominican Republic who are of darker color, seem to

experience less hardships than North Africans in contemporary Spain. This suggests

significant elements of continuity in the centrality of anti-Moor/anti-Islamic discourse as

constitutive of hegemonic discourses of race and nation in today’s Spain. Hence, a critical

exercise of memory as a resource of decolonization of Spanish discourses of history, self,

and culture, should a crucial task within which Afro-Hispanic difference can play a

crucial role.

The third and last set of arguments concerns the relationship between Black European

Studies and a current project that some of us interpret as a decolonial turn in both

epistemic and ethical-political terms. This requires a quick return to the beginning of the

presentation where I introduced the concept of the coloniality of power as a primary tool

for an analytics of the modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system. If coloniality

is a world-historical pattern of power that means far more than colonialism or direct

imperial administration, decolonization should not be reduced to building independent

neo-colonial states. In this larger sense, decolonization a secular tendency running

through the history of capitalist modernity, an uneven process that entails revealing and

dismantling the multiple forms and mediations of the coloniality of power. In this

register, we can talk about a decolonial project to decolonize memory, identity,

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knowledge, economy, and polity. Decolonization is the combined effect of everyday

resistances, multiple struggles, and antisystemic movements. In light of the centrality of

racial regimes in the matrix of the coloniality of power and given the enduring location of

African and Afro-diasporic subjects at the very bottom of racial hierarchy, Black

struggles and racial politics are crucial in the longue duree of world decolonization as

exemplified by the Abolitionist, U.S. Civil Rights, and anti-Apartheid movements.

In the epistemic from we speak not of a postcolonial but of a decolonial critique.

Coming to Frankfurt makes me think of what constitutes critical theory, what should be

the meaning of critique within Black European Studies. Arguably, it means not only

changing the geography of reason or invoking Caliban’s Reason as claimed by the

Caribbean Philosophical Association, but also centering the question of racism in the

critique of domination, and expanding the authors, texts, and probematique of European

thought. For instance, what is the relationship of DuBois with Germany when his

dissertation on slavery changed the course of historical sociology and given that Max

Weber admits that as his student the eminent black intellectual changed his formerly

biological concept of race? Should Cesaire be considered not only a Caribbean but an

Afro-diasporic European thinker who was of great influence to surrealism and whose

Discourse on Colonialism could be analyzed as a decolonial critique of Descartes

Discourse on Method? Should we rethink existentialism and psychoanalysis in light of

Fanon’s decolonial critique instead of seeing his contributions as merely derivative of

western thought? All of these questions are derive from a more general one which is: how

to clearly incorporate Black Europe within a critical discourse of the worldwide African

diaspora? To problematize and develop this concept of the global African diaspora as a
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geo-historical category that is composed by other categories such as nation, empire, and

region is part of our critical task. Methodologically this entails engaging in research such

as comparative empire and across nation-states at the same time that we adopt the African

diaspora in general and the Black Atlantic in particular as units of analysis.

To close, I want to argue that the African diaspora is a complex and discontinuous

constellation of local, national, and regional histories loosely linked by the ties that bind

racial capitalism in the modern/colonial world-system. Diasporic connections had been

especially promoted and enacted by transnational cultural, intellectual, and political

movements in critical moments such as Pan-Africanism of early twentieth century, the

cultural-political convergence of Negritude in Paris, the Harlem Renaissance in New

York, and Afro-Cubanismo in la Habana in the 1930s and 1940s, and the global

movements against colonialism and racism in the 1960s and 1970s. Today, the challenge

is to articulate the worldwide African diaspora by means of a more inclusive dialogue in

which the relatively invisible diasporas such as the Black European and Afro-Latino

could be play a major role from their specific regional locations. The challenge is a

double one of building bridges between the different local, national, and regional spaces

of the global African diaspora while reciprocally learning from differences, and building

a racial politics to oppose racism at the same time that we can develop a transformative

politics of decolonization against all forms of domination, namely capitalism,

imperialism, and patriarchy. This is in a nutshell what we mean by a decolonial turn in

epistemology and politics. That’s why contra Habermas instead of the incomplete project

of modernity we talk about the incomplete project of decolonization. In this tune, more

than a condition or a process, diaspora could also be a standpoint for an ethical-political

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project of decolonization of the coloniality of power. Cesaire contends in the Discourse

on Colonialism that facism expressed the colonial violence of Europe within its own

territorial spaces. The anti-racist revolt in France today and the governmental recycling of

old imperial policies such as curfew, reveal fortress Europe as a mode of recolonization.

The urgency of a critical Black European Studies could be now on the limelight of the

emerging wave of movements for global justice.