Cervantes's Celoso: A Tale of Colonial Lack

The title character of Miguel de Cervantes's "El celoso extremeño," a reconstituted indiano, returns to Spain, builds his house like a fortress, and places a black slave on the threshold, a series of moves with historical and psychological analogies that explain the shape and evolution of a subject characterized by dislocation and lack. The slave, an opposite double of the master, emerges as the interstitial hinge making possible this metamorphosis, exposing the limits of metropolitan order, revealing colonial spaces and actors as determinant in curing the deficiencies of empire, and simultaneously undercutting imperial rigidity by way of the master's metaphorical annihilation.