Sor Juana's Black Atlantic: Colonial Blackness and the Poetic Subversions of Habla de negros

In this essay, I devise the term Hispanic Black Atlantic as a critical tool and discursive geographical space to rethink and revisit Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic model. I envision Sor Juana's colonial Mexican milieu as an integral part of the African diaspora and the Black Atlantic paradigm forged by Gilroy. To move the literary criticism of Sor Juana's poetic corpus toward a new conversation about colonial Spanish American literature and the multilingual world it reflects, I use Sor Juana's villancicos to trace her avowal of Blackness—in its ideological and racial dimensions—as a critical category that travels across space and time while simultaneously turning on their collective head altogether assumptions and claims about Blackness.