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Abstract
This article examines black and indigenous voices in two of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s villancicos: the 1676 Assumption cycle and the 1677 set for the feast of St. Peter Nolasco. Methods of musical and literary interpretation with roots in Western legibility guide prior research on subaltern figures in these pieces. As a result, their unscripted auditory fabric remains difficult to draw out with the critical tools at hand. In response, I propose a framework of ‘un-listening’ that challenges the inscribed bounds of audibility and attunes our critical ear to Afro-Mexican and Nahua auralities in Sor Juana’s villancicos.
Notes
1 Martha Lilia Tenorio, Los villancicos de Sor Juana (México D.F.: El Colegio de México, 1999), 58.
2 Robert Stevenson, ‘The Afro-American Musical Legacy to 1800’, The Musical Quarterly, 54:4 (1968), 475–502.
3 Mario A. Ortiz, ‘Villancicos de negrilla: imaginando al sujeto afro-colonial’, in Teaching Golden Age Poetry, ed. Edward H. Friedman, Calíope. Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry, 11:2 (2005), 125–37 (p. 127).
4 See Geoffrey Baker, ‘Latin American Baroque: Performance As a Post-Colonial Act?’, Early Music, 36:3 (2008), 441–48; and Tyrone A. Clinton Jr, ‘Historically Informed Performance of the Baroque Villancico de Negro Subgenre in a Contemporary Setting’, Doctoral dissertation (Northwestern University, 2019).
5 See Georgina Sabat de Rivers, ‘Blanco, negro, rojo: semiosis racial en los villancicos de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’, in Actas del Congreso Internacional sobre Semiótica e Hispanismo celebrado en Madrid en los días del 20 al 25 de junio de 1983, ed. Miguel Ángel Garrido-Gallardo, 2 vols (Madrid: CSIC, 1984–1986), II (1986), Crítica semiológica de textos literarios hispánicos, 247–55; Mabel Moraña, ‘Poder, raza y lengua: la construcción étnica del Otro en los villancicos de Sor Juana’, Colonial Latin American Review, 4:2 (1995) 139–54; and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, ‘From American Knowledge: The Constitution of a Colonial Subjectivity in the Writing of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’, trans. Isabel Gómez, in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected Works, ed. Anna More, trans. Edith Grossman (New York: Norton, 2016), 272–80.
6 Caroline Egan, ‘Lyric Intelligibility in Sor Juana’s Nahutal Tocotines’, Romance Notes, 58:2 (2018), 207–18 (p. 209).
7 See Nicholas R. Jones, ‘Sor Juana’s Black Atlantic: Colonial Blackness and the Poetic Subversions of Habla de negros’, Hispanic Review, 86:3 (2018), 265–85.
8 Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2020), 15.
9 Robinson, Hungry Listening, 47; emphasis in the original.
10 Jones, ‘Sor Juana’s Black Atlantic’, 269.
11 Robinson, Hungry Listening, 23.
12 Herman L. Bennett, Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico (Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 2009), 4–5.
13 Bennett, Colonial Blackness, 11.
14 Erin Kathleen Rowe, Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2019), 7.
15 Rowe, Black Saints, 7.
16 For a more detailed description, see John M. Lipski, Latin American Spanish (London/New York: Longman, 1994), 98–99.
17 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Obras completas, ed. Alfonso Méndez Plancarte (Vols I–III) & Alberto G. Salcedo (Vol. IV) 4 vols (México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995 [1st ed. 1951–1957]), II, 40. Henceforth, references to Sor Juana's villancicos are to this edition and will be included parenthetically in the body of the article.
18 Geoffrey Baker, ‘The “Ethnic Villancico” and Racial Politics in 17th-Century Mexico’, in Devotional Music in the Iberian World, 1450–1800: The Villancico and Related Genres, ed. Tess Knighton & Álvaro Torrente (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 399–408 (p. 407).
19 Robinson, Hungry Listening, 81–82.
20 Baker, ‘The “Ethnic Villancico” ’, 406.
21 Martínez-San Miguel, ‘From American Knowledge’, 273–74.
22 Ortiz, ‘Villancicos de negrilla’, 128.
23 Nicholas R. Jones, Staging ‘habla de negros’: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (University Park: The Pennsylvania State U. P., 2019), 50.
24 Glenn Swiadon Martínez, ‘África en los villancicos de negro: seis ejemplos del siglo XVII’, in La otra Nueva España: la palabra marginada en la Colonia, coord. Mariana Masera (Barcelona: Editorial Azul/México D.F.: Univ. Nacional Autónoma de México, 2002), 40–52 (p. 45).
25 Real Academia Española, Diccionario de Autoridades (1726–1739), Vol. I (1726), s.v. ‘Alborotar’; available at <https://apps2.rae.es/DA.html> (accessed 14 November 2022).
26 Notable explorations of dance, music, possession and spiritual knowledge in religions with sub-Saharan roots include: Yvonne Daniel, Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Voudou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomblé (Urbana/Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2005); Erwan Dianteill, ‘La Musique et la transe dans les religions afro-américaines (Cuba, Brésil, États-Unis)’, Cahiers d’Ethnomusicologie, 19 (2006), 179–89; Carrie Viarnés, ‘Cultural Memory in Afro-Cuban Possession: Problematizing Spiritual Categories, Resurfacing “Other” Histories’, Western Folklore, 66:1–2 (2007), 127–59; and Joseph M. Murphy ‘ “Chango ‘ta veni/Chango has come”: Spiritual Embodiment in the Afro-Cuban Ceremony, Bembé’, Black Music Research Journal, 32:1 (2012), 69–94.
27 Real Academia Española, Diccionario de Autoridades, Vol. V (1737), s.v. ‘papagayo’.
28 Nina Sun Eidsheim, The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2019), 24–25.
29 Baker, ‘The “Ethnic Villancico” ’, 404–05.
30 Carmen Fracchia, ‘Black but Human’: Slavery and Visual Art in Hapsburg Spain, 1480–1700 (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2019), 24.
31 Real Academia Española, Diccionario de Autoridades, Vol. IV (1734), s.v. ‘murmurar’.
32 In Vol. II of Sor Juana’s Obras completas, Méndez Plancarte includes Ángel María Garibay’s Spanish translation of Nahuatl lines in Villancico 241. For the cited verses, he provides the following: ‘yo no lo creo, / lo sabe mi Dios’ (375). Several scholars have debated Sor Juana’s engagement with Nahuatl and its relevance for popular and critical imaginings of the poet. In addition to Egan (‘Lyric Intelligibility’), see Serge Gruzinski & Nathan Wachtel, ‘Cultural Interbreedings: Constituting the Majority As a Minority’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 39:2 (1997), 231–50; Camilla Townsend, ‘Sor Juana’s Nahuatl’, Le Verger, 8 (2015), 1–11; and Roberto Ignacio Díaz, ‘The Amerindian and European Switch: Translingual Writing and Latin American Literature’, in The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translingualism, ed. Steven G. Kellman & Natasha Lvovich (New York/London: Routledge, 2021), 355–66.
33 In a study that resonates deeply with this essay’s attention to non-Western sensory and expressive modes, Gary Tomlinson addresses the problematic reduction of in xochitl in cuicatl and its accompanying world-view to the Eurocentric categories of ‘poetry’ and ‘music’. Despite resonances among the two disciplines, particularly in the early modern period, Tomlinson rightly observes that interpretations rooted in this dichotomy necessarily take an outside view of in xochitl in cuicatl and thus silence the singular world-view that this art form creates on its own terms (Gary Tomlinson, The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact [Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2007], 20–26).
34 Egan, ‘Lyric Intelligibility’, 210.
35 Egan, ‘Lyric Intelligibility’, 213.
36 Méndez Plancarte includes Spanish translations of these ‘latinajos’ in the second volume of Sor Juana’s Obras completas: ‘Fallecido un Redentor / otro Redentor nació’ (374).
37 Egan, ‘Lyric Intelligibility’, 216.
38 Jones, ‘Sor Juana’s Black Atlantic’, 274.
39 Baker, ‘The “Ethnic Villancico” ’, 406.
40 Jones, ‘Sor Juana’s Black Atlantic’, 277.
41 Jones, ‘Sor Juana’s Black Atlantic’, 277.
42 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Obras completas, IV, ed. Salceda, 442 & 444.
43 Anna More, ‘Introduction, in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected Works, ed. More, trans. Grossman, xi–xviii (p. xiv).
44 Egan, ‘Lyric Intelligibility’, 211.
45 Mark M. Smith, ‘Echo’, in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak & Matt Sakakeeny (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2015), 55–64 (p. 56).
46 Lynne Kendrick, Theatre Aurality (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), xxii.
47 Robinson, Hungry Listening, 101.
48 Clinton, ‘Historically Informed Performance’, 94.
49 See Baker, ‘The “Ethnic Villancico” ’; José Luis Navarro García, Semillas de ébano: el elemento negro y afroamericano en el baile flamenco (Sevilla: Portada Editorial, 1998); and K. Meira Goldberg, Sonidos negros: On the Blackness of Flamenco (New York: Oxford U. P., 2019).
50 Baker, ‘Latin American Baroque’, 444; emphasis in the original.
51 Baker, ‘Latin American Baroque’, 444.
52 Barbara Fuchs, ‘Diversifying the Classics: Adapting Hispanic Classical Theater to Contemporary Los Angeles’, Comedia Performance, 14:1 (2017), 129–51 (p. 149).
53 Fuchs, ‘Diversifying the Classics’, 149–50.
54 Madison Mainwaring, ‘Vogue Dancers Subvert a Baroque Spectacle at the Paris Opera’, New York Times, 25 September 2019; available at <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/arts/music/indes-galantes-paris-opera-hip-hop.html> (accessed 19 October 2020)].
55 Postscript. In an essay that seeks to hear beyond the written contours of subaltern inscription, I would be remiss not to reflect upon the ideological filters that condition my own ear. Without a doubt, my listening positionality resounds among the plethora of voices and resonances that this article draws out. I write about Sor Juana’s seventeenth-century villancicos against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, whose accompanying health, economic and, arguably, political crises have highlighted worldwide social vulnerabilities with deep roots in racial and gendered inequalities. By proposing an intersectional framework for un-listening to Sor Juana’s musico-poetic pieces, I join other scholars, artists and educators who endeavour to remind society of our ethical responsibility towards voices that sound outside of social, political and intellectual hegemonies.
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.