Unlocking the “Hermetic Age”: Excavations of Negro in Spanish and Flamenco Dance.

My project locates and analyses references to negro in Spanish dance in order to pursue the notion that many movements in flamenco’s dance vocabulary and practices resemble dance movements and conventions inherent in sixteenth- to nineteenth-century dances from sub-Sahara Africa and/or the Spanish colonies. Because most flamenco histories omit references to negro people and dances, this work examines the negotiations and assimilation of “blackness” as exemplified in representative historical dances in three eras: the guineo during the Golden Age of theatre (1550-1700); the fandango during the reign of the Spanish Bourbons; and the tangos de negros from the Romantic Age. As a historiographical recovery project for blackness, this thesis stresses the impact and importance of Africanist cultural influence and production in what is identified as a European dance. It shifts the grounds of a static flamenco history to show that Spanish investment in a unified, uncomplicated, whitened, and “exoticised-through-the-gypsy” paradigm is a construction. The continual presence of negros in Spain itself, and in Spanish colonies serves as a reminder, that despite fears of polluted blood, black people were assimilated into the Spanish social fabric biologically and artistically. This work makes a case through dance for the hybrid and cross-cultural exchanges that comprise Spanish national dance, national identity, and nationhood. As negro dances were adopted by Spanish dancers and transformed into imperial commodities, this thesis peels away these constructed layers to expose a corporeal history that enriches our understanding of the multiplicity of Spanish dance and culture