ABSTRACT
Black women abound in the cultural history and literary production of early modern Iberia. Omnipresent, Black women lived in Renaissance urban centers across Portugal and Spain, such as the cosmopolitan cities Lisbon and Seville. These women’s names, Antonia, Boruga, Catalina, Dominga, Francisca, Guiomar, Margarita, Lucrecia, and Sofía, to list only a handful, have also been reproduced in literature across all literary genres and documented in many archives. Paying close attention to articulations of agency, beauty, and resistance, this chapter analyzes and sheds light on the underexamined and undertheorized cultural and literary legacies of Black women in early modern Portugal and Spain. In doing so, the chapter argues for highlighting Iberian Black women’s agency, authority, and power – each codified in forms of Africanized Iberian dialects, material culture, and sartorial style – in order to destabilize and revise present-day critics’ and readers’ misguided and misunderstood perceptions of early modern Iberian Black women as obscenely hypersexual and brutishly weak.
