ABSTRACT
This chapter helps the reader to understand the way Black men and women who lived in the Canary Islands from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century constructed a transnational world and made "Black commentaries on the modern which have been so far overlooked by western intellectual history." It addresses the formation of a Black Atlantic identity in the Canary Islands through the testimonies written down in the Archives of the Inquisition in the Canary Islands. The chapter discusses a few cases of Black men and women who shaped their lives in the early modern period and lived in the Canary Islands. The Black men and women who found themselves persecuted by the Spanish Inquisition faced this discourse of pastoral power and narrative of Christian salvation. The Spanish Inquisition of the Canary Islands was particularly busy in the persecution and suppression of Islamic practices, or what it interpreted as Islamic.
