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Baltasar Fra Molinero
Andrés de Claramonte's El valiente negro en Flandes (ca. 1620) reframes the representation of Blackness in Spain, presenting the possibility for Black people to reproduce themselves in freedom. This essay, through a reading of Frantz Fanon, addresses how, in Juan de Mérida's journey to overcome the social inferiority of his Blackness, he faces the threat of sodomy. Sodomy conjures the Black protagonist's fears about white supremacy. The two different endings the textual transmission of the play offers, one in which the Black hero marries his former enslaver, and another in which the marriage scene is excised, signal the anxiety in Spain about the increased presence of a free Black population in the midst of a society that enslaved kidnapped Africans and their descendants, the scenes of sodomy performance functioning as a form of symbolic containment.
