An Eye on Race: Perspective from the Theater in Imperial Spain (review)

RESEÑAS Beusterien, John. An Eye on Race: Perspective from the Theater in Imperial Spain. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2006. Professor Beusterien’s book, An Eye on Race. Perspective from the Theater in Imperial Spain (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2006) examines a number of comedias written in Imperial Spain to determine their contribution to the European development of the concept of Race. The title cleverly reflects the contents of the book. First it considers what nineteenth and twentieth century critics have said about race, then it looks at what the comedias have to say. The introduction (“Introduction: A Subaltern Approach” 13-32) explains that the work’s intent is to “examine when ... hatred (of the Jew) first becomes racist by focusing on Anti-Semitism in Imperial Spanish theatre”; that is, “when hatred against ones of darker skin first became racist by discussing skin color as the object of denarrativized vision” (14), and “how theater depicted blackness as defiled religion and as skin color” (17). What is largely meant by race is the early attitudes towards Jews and Moors/Blacks. The work is, therefore , a study of the societal attitudes that have a cluster of characteristics in common that adumbrate racial prejudice. Most studies up to now have looked at the question of race from a Northern-European perspective, which for Lacan began in 1789 and ended with Hitler. This view, as Beusterien aptly says, has begun to be questioned as critics look more closely at Imperial Spain. Beusterien, therefore, agrees with George Mariscal in seeing the concept of race as being more “a rearticulation of residual and emergent elements in a different political discourse” (15). Beusterien’s approach is further refined by the concept of a White narrativized and denarrativized vision of race. For him, the Whites look at Jews and Moors/Blacks through a racial filter that makes the subjects (subalterns) disappear , because they are premarked by cultural stigmata. This, he embodies in the concept of the White’s eye that makes “the racial outsider ... an invisible, but conceptual element within the body politic” (24). Denarrativized vision, on the other hand, is way of looking at the subaltern that has a more restricted origin . It first appears in an American and English context but has roots in an 133 English imperial context. Denarrativized vision sees difference epidermically: skin color determines attitudes. Both of these ways of seeing coexist. The work’s 4 chapters are dedicated to the White concept of race (1. “The White’s Eye” 33-57), its effects on the Jews (2. “Blood Displays: Seeing the Jew” 58-100; El médico de su honra, El niño inocente de la Guardia, and the Auto sacramental de la circuncisión y sangría de Cristo), the Blacks (3. “Skin Displays: Seeing the Black” 101-140; Juan Latino, El negro valiente en Flandes, The Black Saints Plays from Imperial Spain), and “Cervantes” (4. 141-171; El retablo de las maravillas). The plays, excepting El retablo de las maravillas and El médico de su honra , are very secondary creations in the incredibly fertile field that is the comedia , but they contain the necessary evidence Beusterien seeks: The narrativized descriptions of the Jew in the comedia are examined through the concepts of blood-letting, blood libel, and circumcision; examples of the denarrativized vision are looked at in the context of plays that make Blacks their protagonists , and Beusterien explains why critics can come to widely different conclusions about the racial attitudes they display. In spite of their seeming disimilarity, Jew and Blacks are characters that appear in plays that are filtered through White eyes and ultimately serve to reinforce its supremacy. In the last chapter on Cervantes’ El retablo de las maravillas, Beusterien attempts to atone for the fact that the protagonists of the plays he has examined are male. He connects a reference the main character of Retablo makes to his negra honrilla (this damn question of honor) to the figure of the negra or female Black, thus tying color and value judgments to black female slaves. The chapter reviews the existence of the female black in the comedia as a minor character and the complex of attitudes that accompany...