Enslaved Black Women in Early Modern Spain: Archive, Literature, and the Limits of Representation

This seminar examines how enslaved Black women in early modern Spain were represented—and misrepresented—across three cultural registers: the legal archive, literary texts, and visual culture. While painting and popular theater often render these women invisible or grotesquely caricatured, legal records reveal women who acted strategically within a system designed to deny them autonomy.

Focusing on two previously unstudied archival cases, the talk analyzes how enslaved women defended their right to marriage, denounced abuse, and pursued freedom through the courts. Read in dialogue with comic theater and visual imagery, these cases foreground a broader methodological problem: the tension between representation and lived experience. By placing archive, literature, and image side by side, the seminar asks what each medium allows us to see—and what it systematically obscures—when confronted with enslaved women’s intelligence, agency, and legal action.

Mercedes Alcalá Galán is Professor of Spanish at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research focuses on early modern Spanish literature and culture, with particular emphasis on Cervantes, visual and material culture, gender, and the poetics of representation. She is the author of “Con esta carga nacemos las mujeres” (Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2022), Escritura desatada: poéticas de la representación en Cervantes, and La silva curiosa of Julián de Medrano. She has completed a new monograph, Archeology of the Invisible: Painting and Popular Culture in Early Modern Spain. Her current research also explores enslaved Black women, race, and visuality in early modern Spain, with particular attention to how absence and erasure shape cultural meaning.