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THIS YEAR MARKS THE THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY of Baltasar Fra-Molinero’s pathbreaking monograph of 1995, La imagen de los negros en el teatro del Siglo de Oro. We honor the milestone with a republication of the study that was its second chapter: “El negro como objeto de risa: elementos de un estereotipo.” We are grateful to Siglo XXI Editores for the permission to do so and to editor Santiago Gerchunoff for the gracious replies to our request.
Our goal with this reedition is to make a key part of Fra-Molinero’s book accessible to new generations of readers, many of whom may not have access to the kind of comprehensive research library where copies of the still vital monograph are available. It was precisely in one such library, the Herman B. Wells Library of Indiana University, that Fra-Molinero’s study took shape, starting in 1988. The revelatory editorial labor of adapting the book chapter for a journal article destined for primarily online readership allowed us to retrace Fra-Molinero’s steps through the library stacks. The bookish journey redoubled our appreciation for his resourcefulness and rigor as a scholar. By any measure, Fra-Molinero’s bibliography attests to a breadth and depth of readings. Admiration grows when one notes that he located his diverse sources, starting in 1988, by thumbing through the drawers of card catalogues, at a time before the myriad online research tools we now take for granted. This study’s paragraphs and erudite notes allow a reader to trace a creative and diligent scholar’s steps from one book to card catalogue and then on to another book, and so forth. Tools for speeding those steps we now take for granted were yet to emerge, whether digitized primary sources or searchable PDF files. Where the latter allow swift keyword searches, La imagen de los negros en el teatro del Siglo de Oro is a book that came together in patient hours reading quietly. Naturally, in editing one chapter from this study for new life as a journal article, we thought much about the logistical challenges and even toil of a study undertaken just before the dawn of the digital age.
But following Fra-Molinero’s steps in the editing process today also yielded a vicarious pleasure for us as editors. In reshaping a chapter of 1995 as an article for 2025 and beyond, we took note of the concentrated focus on one single volume of plays or one article after another, each scrutinized in one attentive reader’s slow time, without the frenetic toggling from book to online database to archived PDF. Perhaps more significant still, Fra-Molinero conceived and carried out his study without the structure provided to scholars of the time working in an established field of inquiry, as one would have had when embarking on studies of the such emblematic authors as Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, or Pedro Calderón de la Barca. [End Page 83] Fra-Molinero’s ambitious undertaking was thus truly groundbreaking in its time. It has remained foundational to the present. As testimony of its importance, we recall Aurelia Martín Casares’s inaugural address launching a landmark international colloquium at the Universidad de Granada on “Esclavitud, Mestizaje y Abolicionismo en el Mundo Hispánico” (28–30 May 2012). She invoked La imagen de los negros en el teatro del Siglo de Oro (1995) as a reference point for the interdisciplinary constellation of fields concerned with the trajectories of slavery studies in the Hispanic World. Closer at hand, a perusal of the articles from this journal’s special issue on Recovering Black Performance in Early Modern Iberia (Bulletin of the Comediantes, vol. 74, no. 1–2) offer abundant evidence of the abiding importance of the monograph today.
We thank Fra-Molinero for the luminous book that has inspired countless scholars and students over the past thirty years and will continue to do so in the years ahead. But as important, we salute him for his enthusiastic and generous embrace of new generations of scholars that have followed him. This collegial spirit animates the interview below between Fra-Molinero and Manuel Olmedo Gobante, which culminated the international...
