An Eye on Race: Perspectives From Theater in Imperial Spain (review)

For John Beusterien, imperial Spanish drama is an ideal place to study the advent of modern racism because when it comes to determining blackness, "drama does not need words and definitions, but puts difference onstage through visible signs recognized by the fleeting glance" (43). In the case of the sub-Saharan African, the visible signs are found in skin color itself. This contrasts with the Jew's perceived "inner blackness" that is inextricably tied to narrative and signaled by visible signs both separate from and related to the subject onstage. Both narrativized and denarrativized visions are essential to the formation of what Beusterien calls the "hegemonic White's eye" that, more than a way of seeing, is a metaphor for the Spanish national myth, an unattainable whiteness defined only by what it is not. As the image of the sub-Saharan African is made unavoidable through the presence of the slave trade, and as the Jew becomes a permanent yet invisible presence in society after the expulsion, the notion of race takes on its modern shape as an unchanging and quasi-biological phenomenon manifesting itself constantly in the theatrical productions of Spain's Golden Age.

Much has already been written about the Jewish converso in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish literature, and Beusterien clearly states that his goal is "not to recuperate a lost history, but to understand how theatre depicted blackness as defiled religion and as skin color" (17). His innovative approach to comedia studies draws from medical, theological, historical, artistic, and folkloric sources as he applies both Lacan's notion of separation/incorporation and Etienne Balibar's ideas regarding proto-racism to better understand a persistence of Jewishness that was supposedly eliminated from the Iberian Peninsula. As his central example, Beusterien chooses Calderón de la Barca's El médico de su honra (The surgeon in his honor), a canonical play with a shocking "blood display" at the end. Although he is by no means a Jew, or even a crypto-Jew, the protagonist Don Gutierre's order to bleed his wife to death is inseparable from an imagined Jewishness informed over the centuries by anti-Semitic discourse on circumcision, blood libel (including the notion of accusatory blood), male menstruation, evil Jewish doctors, and even the "monstrous Passover" invoked by the protagonist's bloody handprint at the end of the play.

Unlike Jews, blacks cannot pass as white while under the gaze of the white's eye, as their literal visibility is a constant reminder of the relatively new transatlantic economy. The stereotypical portrayal of blacks shifts in the seventeenth century, yet slavery still remains a precondition for character development. From here, Beusterien makes an original contribution to the well-worn topic of Spain's baroque fascination with shifting identities and appearances by demonstrating how apparently positive black figures in theatre, whether scholars, soldiers, or saints, are betrayed by seeking the unattainable goal of "inner whiteness" and subsequently placing "a punitive stasis on meaning that, rather than productive, active thinking, results in reactive and reactionary knowledge" (122). This reaction imitates the action of the white's eye, disparaging other groups, whether Jews, Muslims, or simply blacks, who have not adopted standard Castilian as their mode of speech.

In the first three chapters of the book, Beusterien is careful not to attribute any express intentions to the playwrights that he studies, and instead spends his time providing layer upon layer of context in order to understand a national myth of whiteness. However, his analysis takes an entirely different tack in his final chapter on Cervantes. Here, discovering intent is paramount, as all analysis centers around the contention that a specific reference to "negra honrilla" has nothing to do with misfortunes related to honor, but rather to the negra character type found within the theatre of the time. Here, the central example is Cervantes's El retablo de las maravillas (The marvelous puppet show), what Beusterien...