Counter-discursive and Erotic Agency: The Case of the Black Slaves in Miguel de Cervantes’s “El celoso extremeño”

Cervantes’s novela creates a complex protagonist due in part to the involvement of the slaves’ destructive and creative energies: a linguistic and erotic paradox. Linguistically the female slave foregrounds the historical dichotomy between ladinos and bozales and the related problematic of conversion, while the eunuch, a double of the master, brings forth the subject’s erotic deficiency, the basis of an ironic cure through the slaves’ survival and the master’s demise. The eunuch’s Janus-like liminality further complicates the identity gaps of the protagonist, who dies offering a metaphorical image of self-destructive authorship (the silkworm) followed by the rise of other actors who stake spatial and property claims of their own—a dynamic loss highlighting the essential roles played by colonial space and marginal others in the construction of the master’s psychological persona.