BHM Lecture: "Cervantine Blackness as an Ethics of Care"

Name: BHM Lecture: "Cervantine Blackness as an Ethics of Care"
Start: 2026-02-05T17:30:00-04:00
Location: Fredericton Public Library

Schedule

Thu, 05 Feb, 2026 at 05:30 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

Fredericton Public Library | Fredericton, NB

Please join us for the Department of Historical Studies’ 10th Annual Black History Month Lecture!
Dr. Nicholas R. Jones (Yale), "Cervantine Blackness as an Ethics of Care"
Thursday, February 5 at 5:30pm
Fredericton Public Library, Chickadee Hall
All welcome — refreshments provided
Supported by UNB’s Faculty of Arts
Abstract:
In its discussion of Nicholas R. Jones's latest book, Cervantine Blackness, this lecture takes its audience on a journey that explores Miguel de Cervantes's portrayal of black Africans and sub-Saharan Africa, challenging entrenched paradigms and inviting a reevaluation of the complexities surrounding racialized blackness and black social life in Cervantes's literary corpus. By recalibrating the focus from conventional narratives of "agency" and "resistance" to a nuanced understanding of black subjects within Cervantes's works, Jones offers a systematic deconstruction of long-standing prejudices that seeks to forge new paths in literary and cultural criticism. Characterized as a primer for Black Study in Early Modern Studies, the intellectual work operating throughout Cervantine Blackness underscores how Jones himself prompts us to rethink larger questions of care, ethics, and freedom in contemporary discourse.
Book:
The free Open Access version of book is now available! Here's the link: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09877-7.html?srsltid=AfmBOor4nJbVIfFDvYVO6CVU_kpLKLerBmzHtTH7_1g8iLlFIhuC2_lN
Speaker:
Nicholas R. Jones, a Tenured professor at Yale University, is the former King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center’s Scholar-in-Residence at New York University (2021-2022). Jones’s latest single-authored book, Cervantine Blackness (Penn State UP, Nov 2024), presents a searing work of literary criticism and political debate that speaks to specialists and nonspecialists alike—anyone with a serious interest in Cervantes’s work who takes seriously a critical reckoning with the cultural, historical, and literary legacies of agency, antiblackness, and refusal within the Iberian Peninsula and the global reaches of its empire.
Additionally, among his numerous publications, Jones authored the award-winning book Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (Penn State, May 2019) and has guest edited two monographic-length special issues on Black Performance, Critical Black Studies, and Black Temporalities in sub-Saharan Africa featured in the Bulletin of the Comediantes and La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, & Cultures. Most recently, he has published The Routledge Companion to Race in Early Modern Artistic, Material, and Visual Production (May 2025), co-edited with Christina H. Lee and Dominique E. Polanco. Most recently, Jones has published The Renaissance Reader: Beyoncé & Black Queer Popular Culture (Routledge) with Kinitra D. Brooks.