Blackness. The borderline memories of flamenco

Blackness, the group of social and cultural characteristics attributed to the Black race, plays a crucial yet borderline role in flamenco. But ‘what is it to be “Black”? (Black!)’ in flamenco.

It is almost a foreignness that was clearly perceived in people’s skin colour (gypsy, Moorish, black, brown…) and was powerfully present in the dances and sounds that flooded cities and diasporas from the times of colonial expansion. All of them to a greater or lesser extent were frontier or borderline areas that were connected geopolitically, and therefore culturally, with Andalusia.

While black became an element of white wellbeing, the gestural, cultural and aesthetic force of these dissident bodies found its way into the southern border areas, merging with white and brown bodies through experiential and marginal collectivity. Examples of these interesting crossings or connections are the Calle Los Negros in Málaga, the Venta de La Negra on the right bank of the Guadalquivir, opposite Isla Mayor, and the appearance of Gypsyphilia as a substitute for Maurophilia.

The performative lecture series, curated by Alicia Navarro, addresses this complex corporal palimpsest that shapes and underpins the entire cultural history of flamenco. An extraordinary decolonial journey through flamenco blackness as a place of innovation, materialities and mythologies.

Programme

8:00 pm Historias sumergidas (Submerged histories)
Miguel Ángel Rosales

8.30 p.m. The Disappearing Act: una conversación desde un cuerpo disidente (A conversation from a dissident body)
Yinka Esi Graves

9.30 p.m. Joint talk